How much should a website cost?
Everything on the Internet is free – right? Why should you
pay for anything?
Whether you subscribe to that viewpoint or not, if you
decide you or your company needs a website, there’s a good chance you’ll end up
baffled as to what a reasonable amount to spend on a website is.
Some companies seem to be offering all the bells and
whistles for under £100, while you hear rumours that some of the big brands
paid millions for their websites.
As with most things, it mostly comes down to ‘you get what
you pay for’ with a little wariness needed in order to avoid getting ripped
off.
Here is our brief guide to what we think is a reasonable
charge for
web design, from amateur to professional, and why:
Dirt Cheap / Free websites (under £100)
You can get a website dirt cheap or even free. There’s no
doubt about it. There are do it yourself sites such as
Squarespace and
Wordpress which claim that you don’t need any technical
expertise, and there are even designers who will promise you a wonderful
website for only £100 or even less.
If you really absolutely, genuinely have no money at all,
then this is the only option to you, so you must take it, because you have no
choice. However, if you are starting a business, then creating a dirt cheap
website could actually do the new business harm.
This is because a
cheap website usually looks cheap, and the
website reflects your business. Potential customers will assume that if your
website is shoddy, your services and products will be to.
So why isn’t £100 enough for a decent website? Let’s break
it down. A reasonable charge for a skilled professional is about £20 per hour.
Let’s say they’re going even lower than that and only charging £15 per hour.
That gives them about 6 and a half hours to build your site. And these are the
absolute minimum things they need to do:
·
Select and register the domain name
·
Find out what you want
·
Create a design
·
Build the design
·
Insert the content
·
Make any final tweaks
·
Launch the site
6 and a half hours only allows about 45 minutes per item on
this list, and that’s not including any communication time. What sort of design
can anyone do in 45 minutes?
No, unfortunately, anyone building a website for under £100
must be either working at below minimum wage, or cutting corners right left and
centre.
Low priced websites (£500 - £1000)
If you’re on a budget, then £500 to a £1000 can buy you
enough of a professional’s time to build a fairly decent, simple brochure
website.
This gives the designer time to do proper research and spend
time brainstorming a good design that really reflects your vision of the
business. They would have time to do the following:
•
Communicate with you throughout the process
•
Research, select and register the domain name
•
Personal consultation to understand your
business
•
Research concepts and competitors
•
Create a design
•
Rework design concept to your perfect vision
•
Find or create graphical imagery
•
Build the design
•
Integrate social media
•
Insert interactive widgets
•
Insert the content
•
Do detail adjustment to perfect the content
•
Make any final tweaks
•
Carry out SEO work
•
Launch the site
This is likely to result in you having an attractive, well-functioning
website that gives a good impression to visitors and encourages them to get in
contact to find out more about your products and services. You should have
enough room to explain what you do in good detail, include enough content to
keep customers and Google happy and the resources to create vibrant, high
quality imagery to engage your audience.
Medium priced websites £1000 - £10,000
If you have a bit more of a budget available, it means that
you can get more expertise involved and create something a little more special.
With this kind of budget you can start to include elements that will really
lift your site above the competition.
With more time and resources, a
web designer or web design
team will be able to look at nifty interactive elements and will have the time
it takes to ensure they work across all platforms (or degrade elegantly on
those that don’t support it).
They will be able to create mobile friendly versions of the
design and test responsive designs across a range of platforms to iron out any
kinks.
They will probably be able to get more involved in branding
and social media, and promotional elements such as photography and web videos.
A basic
ecommerce solution is likely to fall into this band,
because of the additional technical complexity of running a reliable, robust
database. Ecommerce stores also come with a lot of functionality and features,
all of which have to be developed and tested. However, if you want something
very bespoke for your ecommerce store, you’re probably looking at the next band
up.
Enterprise level web design and development: £10,000 – £50,000
If you’re getting into this kind of money you’re probably
looking at bespoke
web applications and web development.
A basic text and image based website shouldn’t need to cost
this much, no matter how many pages there are
- unless the designer is also supplying the content, or unless a lot of
this budget is intended to go on post-launch marketing.
Within this band you could look at getting an interactive
site that customers can use for something more than just reading text and may
even pay just for the privilege of using. Customers may have their own
accounts, which allow them to view and manipulate data.
The reason this band starts to cost a lot more is that for
more complicated websites you need
software developers as well as
web designers. These jobs are more technically skilled and therefore there is a
much higher barrier to entry, and this means they command a higher salary.
Beware of using cheap developers as they are unlikely to really know what
they’re doing (and are quite likely to be self-taught without the fundamental
underlying knowledge), and you won’t find that out until you’ve forked out a
bunch of money and found yourself left with a spaghetti mess of code that no
decent developer will touch with a barge pole.
£50,000+
Of course you can spend as much as you like when it comes to
websites and web applications, and the price will climb the more features and
functionality you need to put in. However, once you get into the £50,000+ mark,
you’re looking more at bespoke web development than just a simple website – and
that’s a whole different article!
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