Breaking down the costs of a Kentico website

Creating a budget for building a Kentico website is fairly straightforward. It’s a project costing exercise much like any other. But there are a few pieces of the puzzle that can get either overlooked or underestimated. We’re going to break it all down so you can get the best out of the process.

The licence

As a baseline, if you want a Kentico website, you’ll have to buy a Kentico licence. There are different tiers to match different company and site requirements. But this is, of course, a mandatory expenditure for all Kentico websites.

*As of June 2019

Content creation

If you already have a website, it’s easy to assume that current content can be cherry-picked and dropped into the new website. But it doesn’t really work that way. For one thing, old content may not fit the new templates, or the cataloguing and sign-off process may have a significant staff time-cost you hadn’t considered. It all needs factoring into your budget.

If you’re starting from scratch, you need to think about the costs of hiring content creators like graphic designers, copywriters, or videographers. You also need to cost out your in-house time resources. What access do external creators need to your business? Who is responsible for liaising with your digital agency to make sure the content ends up where it belongs? This takes a bit of planning. It’s not something to figure out on the fly.

Discovery, design & build

This is when you hand over your ideas, hopes, dreams, and often the biggest chunk of your initial budget. What you’re paying for, mostly, is people’s time and skills as they go about bringing your Kentico website into existence.

The main focus is to figure out the exact website requirements, how your website is going to achieve your goals (the Discovery phase), what it’s going to look like and how it will function for users (Design), and developing it so that it actually does all those things (the Build).

Content population

Content again! It may seem like overkill, but content is king, as they say. After the website is built, in goes the content, a process that can go smoothly if you plan and budget content creation properly. If not, then content population can be a period of unexpected time and cost, as everyone rushes around trying to do their day job and fit in content population to meet the website deadline. Contnet population can often define if a project runs over the project budget and deadline.

Quality assurance

Testing is a critical part of the web project lifecycle, and there will be plenty of it included in the Design and Build phases. But the more functionality you want to include in your Kentico website, the more types of testing you need to budget for: functional testing, device testing, performance testing, penetration testing, content & design validation, user acceptance testing, etc. Your organisation will need to be closely involved in part of this process to ensure it has real value for the website, which can be a resource drain on your team.

Deployment

There are normally few costs associated with deployment these include: SSL certificates, hosting (depending on your required set up), and the price of any additional domains. Usually, the time and disruption involved with deployment is very small.

Ongoing support

After your website is deployed, it’s still a work in progress. It needs to move forwards inline with security and technology updates, as well as continuous optimisation to maintain modern web standards. It’s vital to have support in place to ensure you’re up-to-date. A good quality support package like Quba Care will both help you settle into your new Kentico site and develop it for the future.

If you’d like to chat more about planning a Kentico website, get in touch with Ryan Gains, our Business Development Executive. hello@quba.co.uk of 01226 279 7779