The website industry in Vietnam is not yet matured. Most of the website providers are
tiny to small businesses or even one-man team. The market in Vietnam demands low cost
websites due to the lack of understanding how a good website can help a business and
how much time and effort must be put into building a great website.
If you are new to websites, we suggest reading our detailed articles on website design template vs custom build website and website cost structure.
A website can be as cheap as you want
In Vietnam, it's possible to find unbelievable offers for $20 USD a website, how do
they do it?
- Low hour rate: due to the lower living cost, the average hourly rate in Vietnam is much lowered than the developed countries.
- Hacky job: utilizing pre-made, low quality templates without any care about accessibility, usability and search engine optimization.
- Hidden costs: high charge rate for any extra tasks such as graphic designs, content edit, etc...
As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. Even with the cost in Vietnam, this
type of offer means that the provider cannot spend more than a few hours on the whole
project. It's not surprising to see that these websites are a waste of time for both
the businesses and the website visitors. These websites are also easy targets for
hackers due to the careless setup and non-existing support. We strongly recommend you
to stay away from these offers. If you really have to save, please consider using
website builders such as Wix, Squarespace and others.
What about the mid-end website projects in Vietnam?
In the mid-end, you can see website project quotes ranging from a few hundreds to
several thousands USD. This price range can give the provider more time to spend on
project meeting, research, design and development. Even so, the mid-end projects
mainly consist of websites built upon pre-made templates with minimal level of
customization. The reason is simple: it's a lengthy process to do custom design, it's
costly to hire talented designers and developers.
It's worth noting that most website design projects in Vietnam are stand-alone
projects with loose connections to the bigger branding strategy. The majority of
businesses in Vietnam does not have the vision, budget and experience to properly
execute a complete marketing campaign that coordinates and utilizes the various
offline and online marketing tools.
High-end websites are rare in Vietnam
High-end websites ranging from $50000 USD and up are rare but there are some. If we
do not count eCommerce businesses such as foody, tiki, lazada that cannot operate
without investing huge amount of money and effort into their website platforms, there
are just a few corporate websites that truly employ high-end services. The success of
these campaigns still have not reached the expected level, however, partly due to the
fact that most marketing agencies in Vietnam do not yet have deep insight and
experience with digital marketing.
With over 50% of the population having access to the internet, it's not hard to see
that digital marketing can revolutionize the way businesses can reach out to customers.
Traditional channels such as newspaper, television cannot provide the level of
interaction that websites and web apps can. To maximize your website performance, we
strongly recommend you to read our article on maximizing your website return on investment.
“ High-end websites are usually custom built and may have a huge price tag to develop and operate. ”
Before you make an investment on your website, make sure you really need a website first. Perhaps you don't really need a website. If you are still determined that you need a website after checking out all the alternatives, why don't you give us a try? We offer one of a kind fully managed website solution with unlimited changes that ensures you can always go back and fix all the mistakes after deployment.
about the author
Vu Nguyen
Vu Nguyen is an entrepreneur, a developer, and a founder of nilead.com. While his love is in the backend website development work, his experience covers eCommerce (being both a real online store owner and a developer), Search Engine Optimization, UX Design and Content Strategy.
Since 2005, Vu Nguyen has led and directed UX design, full-stack development teams on projects large and small for corporations, start-ups, individuals and more. He was involved in every task of each project, from idea to concept and vision, prototype, detailed design, build and deployment.
Since 2005, Vu Nguyen has led and directed UX design, full-stack development teams on projects large and small for corporations, start-ups, individuals and more. He was involved in every task of each project, from idea to concept and vision, prototype, detailed design, build and deployment.
