Just because you paid a lot for that website development and hosting does not mean you received what you paid for.

Content Management System (CMS) companies are notorious for selling you a complete load of crap for a bucket of cash. Most CMS application worth anything are GNU in the first place and cost the developer nothing, zip, nada. The only thing you should be paying for is the cost of labor for installation and setup and of course hosting fees of your domain name and web space.

A good rule of thumb for pricing is $25 to $40 an hour for a good developer to build the system. This would equate to about $100 of labor for a standard CMS install. Throw in the yearly hosting of about $50 to $120 and you are in the right ballpark.

Don’t get fooled into paying monthly charges of any kind. Some companies that offer CMS websites will try to charge you by the number of members on your site that register and still others will charge you house keeping fees to keep your software up to version. While updating a version is time consuming it should be included for at least the year and cost no more then 1 hours worth of labor if not included.

Charging monthly for the number of members is just plain robbery because it cost no more for 1 member as it does for 1000 of them. The systems are completely automated and require not manual member processing so why the charge?

Remember for a good solid CMS website don’t pay any more then $400 tops even if it has tons of bells and whistles.

Darnell Smith, CEO of Business In The Black