How much are you prepared to pay for a website?
An interesting question. Is the answer £500, £5000, £50,000? Yes, they’re all prices that businesses pay for websites. Of course, there is no easy answer to this question because it all depends on the individual or the business. To illustrate this fact let’s look at an analogy.
Let’s ask this question again but this time about a car. How much are you prepared to pay for a car. Of course, it depends or several factors. Firstly, what do you want the car for? Do you want it as a simple city runabout, or an off roader that will take you down muddy country lanes? How many people do you want to carry in it? Just you and your partner, or girlfriend, or a family of six? the answers to all these questions will result in a vast range of vehicles.
These days, there are more questions coming into the mix. Do you want a petrol vehicle, a diesel vehicle, or an electric vehicle? If you decide for electric do you want hybrid, plug in hybrid, or solely electrically powered?
Then of course there is the question of what image do you want to portray? Do you want to come across as wealthy individual? Do you want to come across as someone who’s professional and practical? Or perhaps you’re not wealthy enough to care how you come across to people.
Now look at the online world where you’re looking for a website. Similar questions can be asked. if you are a sole-trader then do you really need to spend thousands of pounds on a website to make you look like a huge corporation?
Perhaps you have a business that requires you to sell products online? Or you require a website to act as a sole source for bringing in new clients? Or perhaps you simply want a website that will act like an online brochure and show examples of the work you’ve done.
So, going back to the original question how much you are prepared to pay for a website, the answer is simply back to you. What are your requirements?
When I talk about requirements, I’m not asking you to tell me what the website should look like or how many pages it should have or any other details that the website should contain. I want to know what you want the website to do for you. Once you’ve determined that we will have a discussion about the website itself. We will also look at your budget. All that should allow me, as a website developer, to give you a proposal which will suit your business requirements and your budget.
But let’s be practical now and look at some actual examples to give you an idea of what you may have to pay. Remember, these are simply examples. Different website developers can quote you different amounts.
Typically, a brochure site of five or six pages should cost you around £600 and certainly no more than £1000.
If you want and online store with thousands of products then the cost will run into the thousands. The more products that you add to the shop then the higher the cost. But to give you an example, for an online shop with around 20 products, payment facilities, I would charge around 1500 pounds.
There’s also another component to the cost that many people forget about. And that is ongoing costs. The website has to be hosted somewhere hosting means it’s stored on a server which supplies the web pages when people visit the site. Hosting can cost anything from £30 per month upwards. Typical costs for hosting from providers who are reliable will be around £50 per month. For that price you should expect 2 have regular backups, regular updates, and protection against hackers.
Another component to the overall cost Is updating. Depending on how things change with your business the site will need to be changed. That will cost. And if your site is an E commerce site where you’re selling products then it is almost certain that the products you are selling are going to change and you will need the site updating.
There are a couple of ways that a website developer could charging for maintenance. One is to charge you by the hour for the changes that are made. Or, and this is appropriate if you are making regular changes such as changes to the number of products on an ecommerce site, then it might be more appropriate to charge a regular monthly payment. The advantage of this is that it acts as a retainer, and you are more likely to get faster response from a developer than if you are paying on an hourly basis for ad hoc changes.
Lastly, there must be a way that customers can address the website. This means you will need a unique domain name such as yoursite.com, or yoursite.co.uk. If you don’t already have one, a website developers will be able to provide one. Typical costs for domain names should be in the low tens of pounds. Anyone who asks for significantly more than this is trying to rip you off.