How much does a website cost? Very often we get asked this question and there is no easy answer for it!
The cost all depends on the individual project, some smaller website projects can cost as little as £800 while others can be £15,000+
Quite often after carefully acquiring all the requirements of a project, and taking time to prepare a full proposal that is as detailed as we can make it including the price required to complete the project, a client may say:
“I’ve seen you can get a website now for £99, why is your quote so high, and can you do it for less?”
We appreciate it’s a recession, and businesses haven’t got cash to spend, but there’s a problem here.
We have an office we pay rent for, computers and software to buy, equipment to rent and service, staffed with web designers, web developers, SEO specialists.
The average experience in identity web design is 10 years to learn and practice what we do, and we spend hours every day learning new skills. It’s a highly skilled practice.
Web design does not only need artistic flare, but the art needs to be translated using web standards, programming languages, server/client integration, HCI and unit testing, relational database and SQL understanding, XML...
the list goes on and on... There is another giant list for SEO, including, site audits, keyword research, onsite optimisation, article writing.... etc....
If for instance identity were to charge £75 per hour (we actually charge less than this, so compared to many other agencies we are very competitive!) you can see that it’s going to take a lot longer than 1.3 hours to build a website that you actually like or would want to promote your business online! A good website can take up to a month of fulltime development, let’s face it, your website is the face of your company on the internet, you wouldn’t want it to look dirty now?
More often than not, cheap means just that…
We’ve tried in the past to accommodate smaller clients, but in our experience, they get a lot more than they pay for and usurp a lot of our time, as we constantly thinking about every client. Clients who pay a lot more deserve all our time.
Your website is an investment and should be organic and grow with your company, if you pay for a cheap website to start with, you’ll be paying more later to get it sorted out! Similar with SEO, its a long term commitment. It takes a lot of time to do. It takes time to see the fruits of your labour, and your competitors are spending more money than you, probably. Get a cheap site with no marketing and you are not serious about promoting your business. You need to think just how committed you are to your business model (relevant to your competitors) if you only want to spend less money than you would for a night out?
There are web design companies out there who will say they can do web design for £99 (or less!), but we wouldn’t never recommend them – you’d be better off buying web design for dummies and seeing what you can produce yourself!
Good luck, remember, you will get what you pay for in any business.
