With a mass of 'build your own website' packages available from a number of providers, you may be unsure if you still need to pay a professional to create your website design or if you can just do it themselves for little to nothing.  Unless you have the experience to structure your website effectively and create good search engine optimised content, the savings on cost are usually outweighed in how much time you will spend working on your own website instead of focusing on your own business.

How much does a website cost?

This is one the most commonly asked questions when people get in touch.  The price for your website design will depend on the size of your website and what features you need to have within it.  A small single-page website will normally be cheaper than a large e-commerce website due to the complexity of the work and the time involved to work with you on creating it.  If you have very specific design ideas then this may also impact on the price if these require additional work from ourselves to implement.

In order to provide an accurate price, we will ask you plenty of questions to gain a full understanding of your business and the reasons why you want a website in the first place.  Once we know what you need, and what your business is all about, we will then have all the information we need to provide you with an accurate price for your website.

How did you arrive at the price for my website?

There are many areas that make up the price for your website design, and we base these prices on our experience of how long and how much work needs to go into each area:

Domain name: This is the name of your website that people need to type in their browser.  A .co.uk domain name costs approximately £10 per year.

Hosting: Your website files need somewhere to be stored on the Internet in order that people can view them.  Our hosting is through the fastest provider in the UK, ensuring that your website loads fast for visitors.  It is also one of the most secure providers around, so your website is protected from hackers and malicious attacks.  Each one of our websites is setup with its own hosting package so you never share space or bandwidth with other clients.  The prices for our hosting are between £30 and £120 per year depending on how much storage space you need and whether your website needs a secure connection (e.g. for e-commerce).

Research and consultation: In order to provide you with the best website for your needs, we may need to undertake some research on the technologies we need to use and be sure they can meet your requirements.  We will also need some up-front discussion with yourself over what you need, the features you are looking for any provide any other guidance on what you are looking for.  The more features your website needs, and the more consultation required, the more this will cost - a complex e-commerce website, with need for specific features may take a number of hours of research and consultation whereas a single-page website will take much less.  As each website is different it is difficult to give an approximate price, however small websites may need £30 of our time, larger e-commerce websites may take £200+.

Design work: This covers a massive part of the time required to create your website design.  From initial work to create the website structure, layout and menu, there is also work on choosing colours, as well as making changes based on your feedback.  As a base price, this would usually be £60 for a small website.

Photographs: This is an area that many people don't take account of.  The majority of websites will need to make use of good photographs somewhere within the pages.  Some types of businesses may have plenty of their own images, perhaps photographs of their work or of their offices.  If you don't have these or can't take some yourself, then the choice is between paying a photographer to take some for you or purchasing stock images from online websites such as iStockphoto.  Purchasing images costs between £5 and £15 per photo depending on the type of image and on the quality of the image.  Using images found online is not normally a viable option as they are most often copyright and you do not have permission to use them.

Testing: As your website is created, we need to test both the functionality and the layout across multiple devices including laptops, phones and tablets.  We also need to test on a range of operating systems and browsers, to be sure your website works as expected.  As well as the time to perform the testing, there may then be the time required to fix any issues.  This will vary in price but a single page website may cost £30 for this element of our work.

CMS setup: The majority of our websites are based on a content management system.  We believe this gives us the flexibility to update, expand and manage your website much more easily than a static design.  It also means we can setup access for you to login and maintain some of the website yourself - perhaps editing pages, adding photo gallery images etc.  If you do need access yourself, as always the price will depend on the scale of your access, but as a minimum price this usually adds about £30 to the overall price of a small website.

Training: If your website has features like a blog or e-commerce, you will often need some guidance on how to use it fully.  Where we provide this training, there will be an associated cost for our time to visit you or meet up and show you how to use things.  Sometimes we can just send you a user guide with step-by-step instructions, other times you may need a few hours up front then additional support over the year.  Expect at least £30 for initial training, and that the overall website price will be based on our time to provide on-going support each year.

Ongoing support: If you are likely to require changes to your website over the year, or need us to answer your questions about using your website fully (e.g. for e-commerce), we will build this into the overall price.  It is hard to put a price on this as each website is different, but expect at least £50 initially for a blog-based website and £100 for a small e-commerce solution.

As you can see, there is a lot more to how much a website costs than just making things look nice - whilst you can pay very little to some website design companies, you need to be sure that the support and effort from the developer matches your expectations.

A website is a very worthwhile investment, and you need to be absolutely sure that you pay the right money for the right service!