ACK controls

[amiga_3k]

@bloodmoney

Depends on a lot of things. Points to consider are:

The cost for building and maintaining a website. It takes at least a few weeks to create a fully informative site from scratch. This means an investment of some odd 10k Euro / US Dollar. Then keeping it up to date takes at least a half days work a week, adding another 1k Euro / US Dollar every week. This money is taken right from the profits.

The size of the company. If it's just a 4 person operation (IIRC that's about the size of ACKControls) those persons have to create the cashflow to pay for a site.

The way of selling products. If they can get enough work in by phoning / visiting potential customers to keep 'em all at work, earning enough money to make a small profit then there's no use in getting even more work. It wouldn't be the first time a company went bust due to too much work being sold (sounds odd, but expanding the order wallet means investing in more people, bigger offices, more machines etc. etc. etc...).

You'll need to HAVE products. If no products are available (or only products developed for and owned by others) for show, there's no use in having a place to not showing it.

Okay, a little site declaring who they are would be nice, but apparently they don't feel it's possible. I know of companies who do produce and develop that don't have sites as well, so it's not that odd. Also, one must nog over-estimate the impact of a site. It's nice for a first contact but in many cases the phone has still to be used.

[amiga_3k]

Building a site privately is a big end cheaper than professionally. With a professional site build during business-hours you'll have to charge all the hours, that's where my estimate comes from. I know what my boss charges for the work our programmer/consultant delivers: that's in the 120 euro/hour region. If the programming and lay-outing takes 2 weeks, that's 80 hours. This comes to a total of 9600 euro. But to be able to build the site he needs input. Collecting that input means talking to staff of the company. At that moment they can't be productive so their hours need to be taken into account as well. Say he needs to interview people for 8 hours. That's a total of 16 hours to be paid for, 1920 euro. Already 11520 euro spent, and that's without the discussions with the buyer of the site. Those hours need to be calculated as well. The cost for pictures to be taken have not been taken into account either. So... even if the hour-rate could be cut to 60 euro/hour I guess I'm not too much of in real cost.

[amiga_3k]

@Gojirax

I'm not sure why it's apples and oranges. Bottomline is that the total cost have to be calculated! Most employees are no Amigas and are thus not capable of multitasking (building a website while still doing the job that's earning them (or should be earning) money: developing hardware). So the time being away from your normal work has to be calculated as well.

The $65k you spend on anti-spam/spy has to come from somewhere! You've got to have it before you can spent it and in normal business that means you first got to earn it.

Sure, Adam (or a friend) could do it on off-time but if you're honnest (even if the site is a given thing) and realistic, the site is worth the money quoted!

A digital business card is indeed easier and cheaper to produce (again, count the hours, even when given!) however still isn't for free!