Despite not giving you a definitive answer this post should give you a better understanding of the different factors involved in determining the cost of a website.

The costs involved

First lets look at the different costs involved with a website. There are the initial costs, the design and development of the site and possibly things such as search engine optimisation and usability if the web design agency doesn’t include them as standard. Then there are the ongoing costs, hosting is a necessity with optional maintenance and then marketing the website.

Price difference

There aren’t many industries or sectors where you will find such a massive difference in price for seemingly similar products. You could get a website online yourself for free with some knowledge and the space from your ISP or you could pay a large design firm with a big office in the centre of London hundreds or thousands of pounds. Of course there is a huge range of prices in-between as well. There are three main reasons for these differences in price:

• Features
• Quality standard
• The web design agency

Features

The first reason is perhaps the most obvious. It’s common sense that the more features you want your website to have the more it is going to cost. Basic features such as contact forms, photo galleries and contact management systems etc.. will cost extra but these costs should be both reasonable and fairly standard as they are popular features that the web design agency will have used before and will only need to adapt them for your site.
However if you require any special feature specific to your site they may need to be custom built from scratch in which case you can soon run up very large bills as you will be charged the whole development costs.

Quality standard

Anybody can design a website these days but not everybody can design good websites. Programs such as Word and Publisher are capable of exporting HTML code and creating a web page from a document. It’s fair to say that these types of websites never look good and actually do your business more harm than good due to how unprofessional they look.

Other factors such as the qualifications or more importantly the experience of the designer will also effect the quality of the website and therefore the cost.

The web design agency

Whilst the first two reasons are fairly obvious and easy to see where your money is being spent the final reason is a little more difficult. It is probably the biggest influence on the cost of a website as well. As I said earlier you could do it all yourself for free or you could chose a web design agency. Of which there are a wide range with different levels of skill, experience and perhaps more directly linked to the cost of your website, overheads. Obviously there is going to be a huge price difference between a website designed by a 17 year old in his bedroom or an internationally renowned design firm which has offices, staff and large marketing campaigns to pay for.

There are people claiming that they can build a website for £100 whilst those world-renowned firms mentioned above may start at £100,000. In this extreme example it’s probably clear which is going to be the better site but what if you don’t have that sort of budget? It’s possible that a 17 year old working out of his bedroom could be just as good at producing a small brochure site but he would definitely struggle with larger projects which required more development and experience.

Balancing act

It then becomes necessary to balance quality, experience and features against cost and select the agency that can deliver the most within your budget.

Ongoing Costs

Hosting

So once you’ve paid for a website to be designed you will need some form of hosting to get it online. Hosting is cheap these days and unless you are going to receive extremely high volume of traffic or are transferring a large amount of data you can expect to pay between £50 – £200 a year.

Website maintenance

Maintenance is an interesting area in web design where there is no standard procedure. Some agencies simply won’t make any changes after the site is completed, others will make a limited number and many offer maintenance contracts. There is no right or wrong solution as long as the client is aware of the procedure and cost from the start and is in agreement. I offer a range of solutions, including free minor changes for the first month, contact management systems to enable clients to make their own changes or various maintenance contracts. I always discuss a clients maintenance requirements at the start and help them chose the best solutions for their situation which will then be written into the contract.

Website Marketing

Marketing of a website is hugely important yet often overlooked. With the level of competition on the web these days it’s a dangerous thing to assume that people will just come and visit your site. It’s vital that you spend time and money promoting your site both off line and online. There are a range of marketing solutions to suit any budget. PayPerClick advertising campaigns are becoming more and more popular as they can be cheap and provide instant results whereas gaining listings via search engines naturally is a long process.

So how much does a website cost then?

Hopefully you now understand that it really isn’t possible to give a definitive answer but at least you now know some of the factors involved in determining the cost. Perhaps the best way is to decide how much you are wiling to spend on your website first. Then ask the agencies what you can get from them within your budget rather than approaching them for a price.

The site was then created using wordpress and can be viewed at www.JetLimos.co.uk

Win-Win

For some small businesses, going online could result in serious efficiency and financial benefits. For many others it can simply provide potential clients with another way of finding out about your company and how to get in touch. You cannot lose by having a website for your business.

The site was then created using, HTML, CSS, Javascript and can be viewed at www.LivingstonChauffeurHire.co.uk

Hopefully, time permitting I will be able to actually create some new posts for you to read.

Richard Livingston - www.LivingstonChauffeurHire.co.uk