The problem I regularly find when quoting a company for a website is that the features we take for granted, other web agencies make a big deal about. Fair enough, it's all about creating a competitive edge against the competition, but I feel clients shouldn't be sucked into a false sense of added value. These website features have already been developed so they are free for anyone to use, they simply need to be installed and configured for your website.

A prime example is web statistics. Of course we include web stats, in fact we install Google Analytics on every website we build! We don't make a big song and dance about it though, it's one of those standard features that we take for granted, and feel that a "Google Analytics Web Stats" bullet point in the quote would suffice. However on a regular basis I find that our clients have been approached by other website or web marketing agencies offering a comprehensive system that:

• Allows them to see how their visitors found their website.
• What keywords visitors typed in to find their website.
• See what links and pages the visitors clicked on most.
• Know the approximate location of your visitors.
• View this and much much more in a easy to use interface with pretty coloured graphs.

This all sounds pretty impressive to clients inexperienced with the developments of the internet, but clients shouldn't be fooled – this is a service that is provided by Google completely free of charge.

My purpose for writing this blog article, is not to uncover every single "free" website feature, but to make clients aware that when comparing quotes from website agencies, it is ok to ask one agency about the features being offered by another – chances are they are included.

Some typical (free) hyped up website features:

• Ability for staff to access web-mail from the website. The web-mail system is already set up with your hosting, you are the web agency is simply adding a link to it.
• Google Maps. Another great feature offered by google free of charge. Let your clients zoom in around a map of your location, view a satellite image, or even see it via street view – just like they are there in real life!
• Printer Friendly Pages. Worth paying extra so that visitors to your website can print out the pages nicely? A correctly built website should print out fine regardless.
• Lightbox Photo Gallery. Click an image, the background greys out and the image grows before your eyes to fill the screen. It looks nice, but once again doesn't cost a cent.
• News and Blogs. All Content Management Systems(CMS) come with a news and blog modules, they simply need to be turned on.
• Website Searches. It's not all that amazing for your users to have the ability to search the content of your website. Its another feature built into all CMS's.
• Regular Website Backups. A prerequisite of any website company. Of course they are going to back everything up, if not they could lose everything (including their clients) if their server crashed.
• Online Page Editors. That is a CMS. They are all online, and they all allow you to edit the website from anywhere at any time.
• Add pages yourself. Yet another feature of a CMS.
• Search Engine Optimised Coding. Search engines constantly update their requirements for the way they like a website to be built. So search engine optimised coding isn't a specific task, except to say "we built websites in the correct and latest ways".

So that is just a few of the features that some web agencies create a high perceived value on for potential clients.

It is important to note that while the technologies required to implement the above features are free, there is some development time required for your web agency to implement them into your website.

Feel free to call us on 08 6389 1458 if you'd like to talk about the featured listed on a quote you've received, we would be happy to help.