What Our Competition Does Not Want You To Know

Pricing

There are a lot of medical website development companies out there as opposed to other website design companies. The reason for this is most companies will charge doctors and surgeons more because they think they have deeper pockets. We, at Jigsaw Design, do not believe that is fair. There is no reason why a website designed for a doctor or surgeon should cost ten times more than a website created for a plumber. Another thing these companies do is charge outrageous prices for hosting and SEO services. What if every company did that? Would you expect to pay $100 for a cup of coffee just because you took the time to learn your profession? Below is an example of pricing from an actual medical website development company.

Other Medical Design Company	Jigsaw Design
5 Page Website $6,000+ ($1290 per page)	5 Page Website $800
10 Page Website $10,000+ ($1,000 per page)	10 Page Website $1,200
15 Page Website $13,000+ ($900 per page)	15 Page Website $1,400
20 Page Website $16,000+ ($800 per page)	20 Page Website $2,000
Flash Additions $4000 and up	Flash Additions $included
Additional Website Pages $750 - $1,500	Additional Website Pages $20 - $100
Basic Website Hosting $1,000+ per month	Website and Maintenance Hosting $200 per month.  Everything is included.
Advanced Website Hosting $2,000+ per month

They charge $6,450 for a five page website? That is crazy! At the most (even with a very difficult client), a five page website can be built in one week by one person. (We have built 30+ page websites in a couple of days.) That means you are paying (based on a 40 hour week) $160 an hour to have a simple website developed. The top Fortune 500 companies would not pay that. Why should you have to pay it? Simply because you are a doctor or a surgeon?

Competitor pricing is based on an average of 5 different research sources and may not be current at this time (may even be more). Feel free to research these prices yourself.

Medical SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

You will hear a lot of medical website design companies claim on their websites that they will get you into the top ten for your desired keywords, yet never show any proof of this. They will charge you between $5,000 and $20,000 for the privilege, plus monthly fees ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. I'm sure our client, Dr. Leonard Gray of Bay Area Plastic Surgery, is happy enough with being in the number one spot on Google since 2004 under the search terms:

• Bay area plastic surgery
• Bay area breast augmentation
• Bay area breast lift
• Bay area liposuction
• bay area breast reduction
• bay area rhinoplasty
• Bay area face lift
• And at least 50 more

Not only does Dr. Gray appear under the Bay Area prefix, but also under prefixes like San Jose and San Francisco. The cost for this site, which is a 20+ page site, was $2,000, plus $200 per month for updating, hosting and maintenance. This is a far cry from the $16,000+ and $3,000 per month our competitors charge.

The truth is -- getting a site to the top is not as hard as some people lead you to believe. All you need to do is create a good site with lots of unique content and put it into a good link neighborhood. You shouldn't pay enormous fees to some directory, which will make your customers have to search twice; once to find the directory and then again to find your site in the directory. It would be better to take that enormous fee the directory will charge you and put it into some targeted pay-per-click advertising.

Incidentally, Dr Gray moved to our company from one of the bigger medical website design companies because they did not perform as promised and charged him A LOT for these failures (I would love to name the company, but they would sue, using some of the money they make of other medical professionals).

Myths About Medical Website Development

Below is a list of common sales tactics medical website design companies use to get you to part with ridiculous amounts of money.

• "We will list you on our local directory that gets 5,000 visitors a day." Ask yourself this; why would you want to spend money on having yourself listed in a directory with maybe 20 to 30 other practices in your area that all offer the same service? You are basically paying to be added to another search engine and taking the chance that the viewer will pick your listing over the other 30 on the page. Chances are they are not going to read them all. If you want to be listed in a local directory that gets millions of visitors per day, then add your site to local.yahoo.com  or local.google.com . It's free (See? We have already saved you money.).

• "We understand all the security issues and rules for a medical website." All websites should be secure and have the customers' privacy in mind. You should not have to pay extra for this.

• "You need to redesign your website every year so it is fresh." Your website is not an apple. It doesn't go bad, unless it was bad from the beginning. Companies will tell you this to charge you for a redesign, which is usually around the same cost of the original design. Your website will be new to every new person that shows up at your site and familiar to all your current patients. You should, however, be updating your content regularly.

• "We can guarantee you top placement on all search engines." No legitimate company can guarantee this. Even the search engines themselves will tell you this. Basically, all a good SEO company can do is design your site with search engines in mind, have good navigation for the web crawlers to search and place it in a good link neighborhood so you are getting relevant links to and from your site.

• "We have spent years learning what works when it comes to creating a website for a doctor or surgeon." Years? What happened to all those clients you used for learning purposes? The fact of the matter is, if it takes you years of trial and error to work out how to make a successful website, then you should really think about your career choice. Could you imagine a doctor telling a patient that it took them years to work out how to perform a surgery, but now they feel they got it right? Chances are you are not going to see much of that patient again!

• "We specialize in medical web design, which means we have more understanding of your needs." Does specialize mean we have spent time working with other types of clients and found out we can charge medical professionals more? The reason why there are so many "specialists" in medical web design is due to the fact they know they can charge more to doctors and surgeons who, for the most part, will pay it. There is absolutely no difference in creating a website for a doctor versus for a retail store. All websites follow the same principles no matter how they reword it.

We understand that design firms have overheads and need to add that into the cost of projects. We know this because, like every company, we have overheads and do the same thing. However, I have a hard time working out how one company can charge ten times more for the same product unless it is being developed on a gold keyboard with diamond keys.

We recently received an email from somebody that claims to be one of our competitors, they had some pretty interesting comments. Click here to read email.