There are lots of questions we get asked every day. One question which seems so simple, is one of the hardest to answer.
How much for a new website?
It's a concise, question. Unambiguous. Simple. Yes?
Well, yes, sure. It's just not specific enough.
If you were in the market for a new car and you walked up to any car dealer and asked; "How much for a new car?", you'd have to give the poor chap at least a bit more information before he could give you an answer. Perhaps things like:
- Your budget?
- What the vehicle will be for?
- How many passengers?
- Storage space requirements?
- Fuel type?
- Any other required features; air con, heated steering wheel, digital TV with rear screens, park assist, etc.
Until the dealer knows what type of vehicle is going to suit you, he has no idea what to give you outline figures for. A little city car, or 7 seater monster SUV.
When you are thinking of have a website created for you, and you want to get an idea of what it's going to cost you, you will need to put some thought into your requirements. You'll need to say more than "Just a small website", unless the agency your dealing with already has a package for "Small Business Website" and the options it comes with suit you.
For example, we do have a package, "Small Business Website", which is for up to 5 pages, including contact page and privacy policy page, and a cookie consent popup which comes in at £300 + VAT.
We find it's a very popular package and suits a great many of our small business owner clients. It's priced based on the amount of time we estimate it will take to get the website online and live. Up to 1 full day or 7.5 hours. However, it assumes the client will give us all the required content to populate the pages, and tell us what pages they want. It also assumes the client will provide any logo, if there is one. We make additional small charges for using stock images. So the price may go up by £10 or £20 depending how many we need to use.
Your checklist for a new website
There are at the very least, a few things you need to have thought about and decided upon before seeking web development services.
Logo
Does the business have a logo? Make sure you have it in a vector format such as .ai, .svg, or .eps
Your web designer may be happy to create a simple logo for you, but not always. It may be an additional cost. Our advice is that unless you have millions to plough into branding, then it's a bit of a waste of time. Just keep it simple.
Hosting
You may find your designer has no preference where your site is hosted. More than likely though, they'll want you to host the site with them so they can charge you a monthly/yearly fee to support and maintain the site for you. More often than not, this is not a good deal for you. Typically, they'll have a cheap VPS server with minimal protection for your site security. Plus, it'll be slow.
Better would be to get rock solid fast wordpress hosting, complete with full security, backups, and a global CDN at 365i. The support you'll get from us will also be much faster and superior too.
Perhaps suggest to your designer that they get an Agency Package at 365i, and then you'll be happy to host via them, on 365i.
Domain Name
Do you have a domain name? Have a look at see what domains are available? Decide what domain extension you want? .co.uk, .com, .uk, .shop? You can register domains through 365i and save up to 50% over other providers.
Do you need to transfer your domain(s)? Transferring UK domains to 365i is free. Others may require you to renew the domain for 1 year.
Mailboxes
WIll you be needing mailboxes to use with your domain(s)? Do you actually have existing mailboxes hosted somewhere that you need to migrate? With every hosting account at 365i, you'll find a mailbox migration tool that will import all the mail from any other mailbox hosted anywhere. You just need to provide the login details of the mailbox.
Menu Structure
You need to know what pages your website is going to have. So this means taking some time to think about what your website is going to say, and how your going to break that down into different, easy to navigate and follow, pages. We advise clients to work out the actual menu, from the home page, through to the contact page. Visualise that menu. Perhaps use Microsoft Excel to map it out? Or Powerpoint? Ultimately, the web designer is going to need this in order to start work.
The menu structure you provide will let you both know how many pages there are going to be, and what pages you need to prepare content for. Again, we ask clients to create a separate document for the content of each page. Remembering that each item on the menu is (or at least can be) a page. So for example you may want to list a bunch of services under "SERVICES" on the menu. But the menu item "SERVICES" will also be a link to a page, unless you want it to redirect to perhaps the first service on your list? That's not a great idea though. Better to have a services page with links to every service.
Colour Scheme
You may already have some feelings about a colour scheme? If you don't, perhaps research other sites that are similar to the one your going to have created. Note things you like, and things you don't. The point is to give your designer some direction. Try to ensure they are heading in the design direction you like. What they can do may be restricted by your budget, but make sure the designer knows what you like.
Images
You may have an idea of images that you want to include on your site. You may even be thinking that photos you took on your smartphone are perfect. This is rarely the case, unless your a professional photographer and have already prepared the camera raw images.
The thing with using images on a website, is they really stand out when they are bad. A bad image might just be poor composition, poor lighting, or contain all manner of other things you didn't notice at the time (empty wrappers, coke can, general waste, etc). Unless you have need of a gallery of images of your actual products, or maybe before and after galleries of the services you provide - don't do it!
We recommend using high quality licensed stock images exclusively. If the images are good, the thing is they won't even be noticed. On any web page, it typically the things that are bad that stand out, not the good.
Your Content
Content is King! That's what they say. It's true.
Keep your content short and snappy. Say what you need to say, in easy to understand language. Don't over explain, and don't use 100 words when 20 will do fine.
Less is more!
Try not to mix the focus of the content on any page. That's SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) advice. If the focus of a page splits into 2, then you just discovered you need to add another page.
In Conclusion
How much is a new website? Well, it depends on what you want the designer to create for you?
Do yourself a favour and do a little research and thinking BEFORE talking to designer. Equip yourself with the ability to answer their questions about what your requirements are. You'll be in a far better place to negotiate a price when your able to show you know exactly what you want, and have made it easy for them to get started.
If you have any questions about building a new website either for yourself, or your clients, get in touch.
