Would you pay £350 for a brand new website?

[Designing4u]

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[Whistle Ink]

ecommerce site or normal?

[Richard Conyard]

No, I wouldn't since it's too cheap.

How much time does £350 really get me, a day, two days - a week? Lets say a week, if I am going to get a website then it's likely I'll have it for at least a couple of years so it's going to take a little while to pull together content, get the correct look and feel, slice it up properly, make sure the CSS is compliant, make sure my site looks unique, etc., etc., etc.

Nope, it's too cheap.

[MinuWeb]

No, I wouldn't since it's too cheap.

How much time does £350 really get me, a day, two days - a week? Lets say a week, if I am going to get a website then it's likely I'll have it for at least a couple of years so it's going to take a little while to pull together content, get the correct look and feel, slice it up properly, make sure the CSS is compliant, make sure my site looks unique, etc., etc., etc.

Nope, it's too cheap.

I wish more people would think like this......

[Richard Conyard]

Yeah, it's not altogether fair since I'm in the industry and know what needs to go on.

There is a remit for cheap and cheerful web design, but any client taking this route really shouldn't hold out for much.

[MinuWeb]

It's the same with hosting, clients want everything for £1 / month.

I don't think they realise we need good hardware, office space, staff, food, drink, housing etc etc + a small profit

I moved out of the "price war" hosting a few years ago when I could see what was going to happen. I might have fewer clients because of this but they pay more and enjoy a more reliable service for it :)

[TechFox]

I have also found that the best way is to have fewer clients but better relationships with those clients.

[Anonymous]

I can send any Forumer a free e-book that shows you exactly how to build a website and how to promote it!! Get in touch and I will e-mail it to you no problem :D

[Ozzy]

I agree it is too cheap. I pay more than that just for new design visual templates!
A website is on public display and shows the world what kind of business you are. A cheapo website "could" create the impression of a cheapo company.

[Eagle]

I wouldn't pay £350 for a website. Far too cheap.

[Whistle Ink]

I think the reason why people find £350 websites great is because:

1) They are on a limited budget and want to get the maximum for what they have available to spend. So what they go for is motivated by how much they can afford rather than the result and quality of the result to be achieved / expected.

2) They don't necessarily know what a really great website looks like or how good it could be, so if they saw a £350 website example, they might be impressed with it, without knowing it could be alot better.

3) They havent considered the impact of good website and a bad website. If they for instance did research and found, a certain group of customer would like an easy to use, more information and help website when buying a certain product and would probably buy from their if they provided this, wouldn't you invest a little extra in your website?

4) They are just 'trying out' the idea of having a website, but don't realise how ppl might perceive their first attempt - they may be put off for life!

[Ozzy]

1) They are on a limited budget and want to get the maximum for what they have available to spend. So what they go for is motivated by how much they can afford rather than the result and quality of the result to be achieved / expected.

This I agree is a very valid point in that some people when starting their business may consider other things more important to spend their money on. However, there is a danger of false economy here, and I think the biggest problem is lack of education for some people in unestimating the importance of creating the right impression to their postential client base.
This isn't just relevant where a website is concerned, but it is also just as important in the quality of everything from the logo, the business cards to the printed adverts such as in magazines and the Yellow Pages.

2) They don't necessarily know what a really great website looks like or how good it could be, so if they saw a £350 website example, they might be impressed with it, without knowing it could be alot better.

Again, I feel this could be down to lack of understanding and education in starting a business. I still feel a lot of people in this country particularily underestimate the true power and reach of the Internet, and what effect not using it properly can have on your business. It is true that good or bad use of the Internet can make or break a business these days.

3) They havent considered the impact of good website and a bad website. If they for instance did research and found, a certain group of customer would like an easy to use, more information and help website when buying a certain product and would probably buy from their if they provided this, wouldn't you invest a little extra in your website?

Agreed. I do it myself.
When I look at my own website and how it has grown over the past few years from the original rather naff design to what it is today. I personnally think my own website is OK, and when it was first done I thought it was brilliant, but technology does not stand still and I have to constantly re-invest in my websites to keep ahead of the competition. Mind you, I have a good technical background so to me doing this "just makes sense". My 4th website facelift is already being designed.
Take these forums for example. I have spent over £1,500 on the design and coding alone so far this year on them. If I didn't I believe they would not attract the amount of interest and activity that they do.

4) They are just 'trying out' the idea of having a website, but don't realise how ppl might perceive their first attempt - they may be put off for life!

That is what I find quite dangerous. A new business trialing something in the public view that could have a negative effect on their businesses reputation which coudl then take them years to recover from!

I don't know the answer, but this is something I do have strong feelings about. Very much less than half of new businesses that start each year make it past the first 12 months, and I think its a terrible shame that this does not need to be the case. Ofcourse there are hundreds of different reasons for this, but this thread is about websites and I feel that totally underestimating the importance of a quality website is a terrible mistake to make. Its the companies reputation and image on the line and in the early days of a businesses life when against such daunting odds a new business cannot afford to give out the wrong impression.

[MinuWeb]

It's like the companies whose "managing director's, wifes, cousin's son id really good at that kind of thing" and it turns out to be a 14 year old using frontpage.

Would they get the same person to design an advertisement for a national newspaper / magazine / radio or TV ? Of course they wouldn't, they would contact a professional to do it.....

[epiphany]

Depends on what the website is, £350 could be expensive or cheap :)

[Richard Conyard]

Lets be honest here - £350 buys between half a day and day worth of a skilled designers time. All the money equations work back to time and skill so it's a question of how much time you think your website is worth?

[PowerBasket]

Depends on what the website is, £350 could be expensive or cheap :)

Very true!

My company makes shopping carts for companys at £19.95 a month, this can be considered cheap to a £350 website. Or expensive to a site like oscommerce.

All depends on the end result from what the developers put into the site.

Also if the client needs all the features!

[Fusionhost Group]

I was in the hosting wars as well and I backed out because of the mass flood in the market, and also my server got hit by lightening, and my provider (lives near me) disipeared.

So I could not afford to get back into hosting, and to be honest nor did I want to because everybody wants everything for nothing, I had one potential customer email me asking if I could do them discount and instead of £15 a month do the package for £2.50 a month inc. domain...

Shocking and not a way to conduct business because like a lot of hosting companies that are so cheap. They go out of business.

[Pete Williams]

When I launched my site last year (wwwamericanpool-network.co.uk) it cost £850 in total and that at the time with no knowledge I felt was a good deal for what I got.

My second site (wwwapn-leagues.co.uk) was free, I did it myself. Took me a few hours but I think it looks great. I also learned a lot through doing it. However, when I come to do my next one I will be in touch with the professionals!!!

[Richard Conyard]

At £850 you got a good deal with your members area, forums etc. included.

[TWD-Tony]

I'm sitting on the fence on this one guys...

On one hand I agree with what has been said about the price being to low for a decent website, but you have to see that it is a buyers market - designers have to offer these sort of low price deals to get clients... It's no good being the best designer in the world and charging £2000+ per website - nobody would dream of using you (unless you are a Beckham!).

It's very difficult to price these things correctly (I know), if this guy says that he can produce a website for that price then what is wrong with that? Design is personal thing anyway, there will be people that love the look of your website and others that don't - no matter what the costs involved.
I also find that people get bored with their design after so long (a year or 2) and get a redesign, so maybe a decent, low-cost option that you can afford to get re-designed when you are finally bored with it is a better option than an expensive one that you would have to think twice about re-designing even if you wanted to.

[MichaelG]

Umm this is an interesting one. A £350.00 website is ok if it does the job. I have met people that spent 60k+ for a website which frankly I thought was a total waste of money.

So many people focus too much on how a website looks than what it provides (the added value). Don't get me wrong - design is important but its more important for your website to offer customers/users/clients more than just great design.

[TWD-Tony]

I totally agree - if the site is easy to navigate, functional and helps your customers / clients find out what they need to know before they get bored and leave then this far outweighs the design aspect (for me anyway).
Functionality must always be the number 1 priority, have you ever visited a slow loading Flash driven website? Did you stay there for more than 10 seconds? Didn't think so..... :roll:

[MichaelG]

Well I don't mind flash sites - flash has its uses and can be wonderful when used appropriately. And for some website (games, multimedia presentations, etc) flash is necessary.

What I hate the most id the splash (click here to enter) or intro page (click here to skip intro) - what a waste of a good click ;)

[TWD-Tony]

Well I don't mind flash sites - flash has its uses and can be wonderful when used appropriately. And for some website (games, multimedia presentations, etc) flash is necessary.

What I hate the most id the splash (click here to enter) or intro page (click here to skip intro) - what a waste of a good click ;)

I agree that flash has it uses - I love those Flash games websites :lol:

But the majority of Flash website's are WAY WAY over the top - If i have to wait ages for buttons to fly in, graphics to spin around and content to finish jumping around then I usually leave...

I have the greatest respect for those that can produce a decent website using Flash - but I find the best results are from partial static & partial flash mixed websites.

[Richard Conyard]

It's no good being the best designer in the world and charging £2000+ per website - nobody would dream of using you (unless you are a Beckham!).


Umm we seem to be doing okay (well the design side of the company is), at a fair bit greater than that ballpark.

Although everything is costed to requirements I guess small scale is between 2K and 5K, mid-range is 5K - 15K and our larger solutions have been known to go 60K+.

But then you pay for what you get. Almost everything that comes out of here has a high degree of programming behind it to match and improve business process and browsing experience, the (x)HMTL code should invariably be full standards compliant and accessible, the rights on the images used are fully secured and legit, clients are taken through every step of the process with dedicated PM and the designs (IMHO), more often than not are stunning (although there is no accounting for taste).

At the end of the day whatever is charged for comes down to day rate, or hour rate and well £350 doesn't buy a lot of that for any established company. It will either get templated design (i.e. you look good'ish - but there are lots of companies that look similar), or a very small amount of time.

Say a freelancer wants to take home £500 a week, tax, insurances, rental, utilities, telephone, accountants fees, paper etc. probably put that up by another £150-200. So were now up at £700 (conveniently 2*£350 ;) ).

So, £700 translates to £2.5 days on a 5 day week. But it isn't what you're getting. There is the time taken for admin, marketing and all those annoying bits and pieces that crop up, so if we throw a day a week at that which isn't unreasonable we're now 4 days, of which you might get 2 days.

Of the two days available from our freelancer there is the back and forward time to move the project on. Design concept, Imagery, mock-up, interactive mock-up in HTML, Content, SEO, etc. which really are needed to get a good looking site that works.

So, to get this all done there is going to be communication backwards and forward, content collected, designs agreed, etc. From experience these things normally take time, clients like to go away and have a brief think, find out what they really want to be saying on their about us page, or what will be their meta data etc. So we can throw a turn around time of two days out of the window. This means to make the £500, the freelancer needs to be working on more than just their 2 projects a week. With a two week turn around with client information to make his money he needs to be doing 6 concurrent projects, 2 finishing, 2 to finish next week and 2 to complete the week after that. So there goes more of the clients time.

At the end of the process I would say that the £350 buys less than a day of the freelancers time. No if all you're after is a few pages on the web saying your there, maybe a day is all your website needs (and you might want to take yell up on their offers and do it yourself). However if you were hoping to get something that was going to be slightly more than an online calling card, that you'd hope to get business through, is a day enough?

Sorry for length...

[JoyDivision]

I was thinking of targeting smaller companies and charging this sort of money, but for £350 the site would be static, it would be basic, it would be pure CSS driven in terms of the layout, and would comply to W3C CSS and XHTML/HTML standards but all I could do for £350 is somthing basic - i.e an online brochure.

This would also assume the companie has access to royalty free graphics and they own their own logo otherwise I would have to contract a graphics designer at £10 ph (I happen to know a good one who is a masters student).

So in terms of actual development time I doubt I could spend more than a day on it, but if its a simple brochure site a day is a lot of time to get things perfect.

If it needs lots of bells and whistles then I go into software engineering mode and there is so much more to consider such as database optimisation, security etc all this consultancy costs money, in some aspects I might even have to contract people to do stuff.

I am hoping to target my CMS to smaller companies though then theyare just paying for a ready made product and they have to worry about the design unless they want to pay extra for my services.

[TWD-Tony]

I was thinking of targeting smaller companies and charging this sort of money, but for £350 the site would be static, it would be basic, it would be pure CSS driven in terms of the layout, and would comply to W3C CSS and XHTML/HTML standards but all I could do for £350 is somthing basic - i.e an online brochure.

This would also assume the companie has access to royalty free graphics and they own their own logo otherwise I would have to contract a graphics designer at £10 ph (I happen to know a good one who is a masters student).

So in terms of actual development time I doubt I could spend more than a day on it, but if its a simple brochure site a day is a lot of time to get things perfect.

If it needs lots of bells and whistles then I go into software engineering mode and there is so much more to consider such as database optimisation, security etc all this consultancy costs money, in some aspects I might even have to contract people to do stuff.

I am hoping to target my CMS to smaller companies though then theyare just paying for a ready made product and they have to worry about the design unless they want to pay extra for my services.

That sort of sums up design in a nutshell (to me anyway).

People will always be ruled by their wallets (or purses) - you cannot get away from it. The small business owner is very cost concious, where as a larger national / multi-national company does not have these restrictions... If the manager / director of marketing says that a decent website costs £50k+ then that is what they pay, tell that to your local small car dealer or flower shop and they will laugh until you shut the door behind you... :lol:

I'm not saying that £50k+ websites are not needed or worth the money, if you are talking something that takes weeks / months to develop with backend coding, artwork / graphics, testing and constant re-working until the client is 100% happy then fine, but don't forget the little man in the street who doesn't know why he/she wants a website - just that they think they need one....

[JoyDivision]

Its that small business market I want to try and target, its just going to be hard to try and deliver a professional service, a professional product within a budget that these companies can afford.

At the end of the day I want to produce things that clients and want and like. I don't really care if my clients are Siemems or Joe Blogg's Flower Shop.

The market is sadly saturation, my dole money confirms this, but one of the problems is the cowboys are giving the market a bad name so its very hard when qualified people with some experience try and setup a company as they have no real portfolio.

I think a lot of the better companies need to stop underpricing them out of the market in order to compete with the cowboys.

[Enigma121]

The root problem here is this. The average small business customer doesn't understand web technology and can't tell the difference between a good site and a bad one until it's too late.

This leads to two outcomes:

1. The customer goes to the cowboy and gets burnt, then starts to look for a more reputable firm. They are then prepared to pay more, but often have already blown their budget.

2. Reputable firms don't get customers, so they go bust.

End result is a lot of customers looking for good quality solutions and nobody there to provide them.

The only way out of this cycle is to educate the customer in advance of purchase. If they know your design is better and they can SEE why, they might just pay that bit more...

As a bonus, you'll be around to mop things up when the cowboys have had their day.

So here's the news - we aren't just web designers or software engineers anymore. Now we are educators and salesmen as well.

[JoyDivision]

The thing is some of the clients that get burn't are by the big boys. As a lot of these could not care less about Joe Bloggs flowers so they do the site but not to the standard they would for their bigger clients.

[Jayne]

Hi,

As a small business person who also couldn't tell a good site from another, I would probably go for the £350 site. Also as a customer who goes on sites, I still cannot tell the difference.

To me, it's more important to see the goods for sale and prices, It doesn't matter to me if the site has flashy looking bits or not. For example, if I wanted to buy a kettle, this same kettle was on two sites, it was £10 cheaper on the none flash site..sorry but i'd save a tenner :lol:

Big companies have to go for the flashy sites mainly for show, for example, Virgin site, if they had a cheep site, you'd think tight sods, because you know they make loads of money :D

Bit like the directors of a company having flash cars, it's expected :D

Jayne

[JoyDivision]

Just as longs as you are ware of the legal issues, if you have a cheap and nasty site which breaks the accessability laws you could land yourself into legal trouble.

That is usualy the difference between a cheap and expensive site. You can build a two houses that look the same one for £50,000 the other for £80,000, the £50,000 might fall down in 10 years time where the £80,000 would last for ever.

[Jayne]

I guess it depends on what you are selling, to what sort of site and expence involved.

I was meaning for example, ebay looks like a cheap site to me and that probably cost's loads. Some of the sites i've seen on here are much better looking, but maybe only cost a fraction of the price.

As I said I now little about web sites, I was giving a view from a customers eyes.

It all boils down to what you can afford, web designers make there own sites, so costs them little. £350 is a lot of money to a small business who is starting out and knows nothing about web sites, so sometimes this is all they can afford. As long as they sort out the legal side, they could still do ok with a cheaper site. :D

Jayne

[JoyDivision]

Lets but this way if you want a site with the functionality of ebay it would cost probably at least £100 million.

It really depends what you want if you just want a static brochure site then £350 should be all it needs to cost, as this the site will only take a few hours to develop, the rest of the money will be spent on the consultancy stages.

[Jayne]

That much :shock:

I guess £350 isn't much then :lol:

I am gob smacked with that, that much for ebay. Just shows you cannot tell just by looking. Maybe there should be a web site to tell us none techies about this stuff, what to look for in a good web site :D

Jayne

[JoyDivision]

Yep becuase ebay gets so much traffic the hardware behind it is imense, then the software that controls the back end has to be robust and be 100% secure.

I have made sights like ebay before for assignments, thats not hard to do but as soon as you do it in the real world so much more issues become involved. I guess if you wanted to start ebay from scratch it would cost about £100,000+.

I guess I a lot of that figure I guestimated was the cost of bandwidth and hosting and thats not really what this thread is about :).

Its like cars you can get a decent reliable one for £200, but it won't be long before it starts to become unreliable.

[Richard Conyard]

Just as longs as you are ware of the legal issues, if you have a cheap and nasty site which breaks the accessability laws you could land yourself into legal trouble.

Bit off topic, but what accessibility laws? Whilst it is clear from the guideline documentation of the DDA that if a service is offered only via website that the service should be accessible there is no case law or tangible benchmarking to say what is or isn't breaking the law.

[JoyDivision]

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml

If you do a website full of images for links, badly labeled tables, images with no alt tags, text with font tags etc etc then blind people have no chance of using it.

Some companies have been sued but so far they have all setteled out of court.

[Richard Conyard]

True,
But as I said there is no case law to back this up and no definition of reasonable. So looking at the reverse should you produce a WAI AA site you still can't gurantee that you're not going to be sued.

[Astaroth]

No matter what you do, even when there is case law, as a business (or even a private individual) there is a chance that someone will sue you.

The problem with having a legal system based on Common Law is the fact it can take years (if not much longer) to get a reasonable amount of case law to make more practical guidelines but even then case law is open to interpritation.

At present http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ really is the best there is as a guideline as you say

[JoyDivision]

True,
But as I said there is no case law to back this up and no definition of reasonable. So looking at the reverse should you produce a WAI AA site you still can't gurantee that you're not going to be sued.

But at least if you stick with the standards you have a lot less chance of being sued.

[Richard Conyard]

In theory yes - but who knows in practice?

It's why some of these ambulence chasing designers really miff me. What's worse is normally they haven't a clue about accessibility bar their insistence on using alt attributes even when you shouldn't. I bet half of them haven't used a screenreader in their lives.

Hopefully the DRC should have the initial stages of PAS78 out sometime soon which should make interesting reading.

[JoyDivision]

With regard to ALT tags if it shouldn;t have one I usaly stick the image in a DIV as the image would be apart of the graphic design rather than the content.

But any image in an ALT tag should really have it, even if its just an illustration blind people won't know what it is and may think they are missing somthing.

I am not saying everything needs to be AAA standard and comply with RNIB guidelines but I think a lot fo companies still need be a lot more aware of it. For one thing accessable sites are more search engine freindly.

[Richard Conyard]

Have to disagree there - images that are purely for display either like you say stick them in a div, or give it an empty alt attribute alt="".

alt and title attributes if not used make life hell for screen reader users, but if overused are just as annoying.

[JoyDivision]

What ever you do don't do this

www.topman.co.uk

I though big companies learn't their lesson about Flash years ago?

http://www.topshop.com/promostores/tops/index.html?make_live=yes&promo=

Also with regard to ALT tags I.E gets this wrong, and becuase of this web designers missed use them and thought they were a funky way of displaying text when the mouse hoovered over it.

Firefox gets it right, the ALT tags are hidden from the user unless you look at the image properties.

[e-web solutions]

We have something similar.

but we dont just say £400 for a website, we actually state that with this package which is aimed at small businesses that they only get 3 pages which is basically there to tell people what you do and to contact.

the website will be standards complient also so it will be a good site.

we are a new company and there is no chance at all that we can come in and offer top dollar prices for our services. we just wouldnt get the contracts off the bigger firms.

Maybe in a few years when we have established ourselves in the market we can have a look at raising prices as people would come to us because we do a good job not because were cheaper.

But at the moment we need to offer the lower prices to get us in the market.

Nothing wrong with that is there?

[thelock]

we tried to do something similar (but obviously in the construction industry) but found people thought we were slightly cowboy-ish. When we upped the price we found that we actually got more business. I know they might be two different industries but I think that most people will always think that there is a catch with cheap packages, whether it's that you aren’t much good or that they are going to be nailed with extra charges. In my opinion cheap equals too good to be true. Prices should be reasonable.

[e-web solutions]

Then all you need to do is state exactly what they are getting.

therefore no catch

[mrbusiness999]

wow, big thread!

What a client of mine did was offer a package, say 4 pages for £700, then in the news post an article saying all packages half price. This really got business going for him. Might be worth thinking about ews.

[e-web solutions]

Thats a really good idea that.

thanks a lot

[mrbusiness999]

Happy to help- btw, expect a PM from me soon, I moving up north in the new year with a bit of luck. Know any good graphic design/ web design firms?

[e-web solutions]

well there is us.

where about in the north are you going.

there is a good graphoc design company we use in harrogate. theyre pricey but very good and well known.

[mrbusiness999]

going up into Thirsk hopefully. I am looking to move into more of the web side. Do you know if they/you are taking on staff at the moment?

[e-web solutions]

We arent at the moment but in the future hopefully.

to be honest an investor would be better.

PM me when you are moving up and well have a chat.

[MDUK]

Great thread, one thing that nobody has pointed out yet. £500 to a one man band might be worthy of as much consideration as £50k is to a medium sized company.

You work to your budget. i did my first site on Front Page (a good few years ago) just to have something on the domain. I didn't have time to do anything myself so i paid someone £300 for V2. I wrote it and supplied images. I paid £2k for V3 and have spent £2/300 this year to make changes.

I now use contribute to update/change text and will be changing the look (but not dramatically) at christmas to incorporate new company logo( to mark 10th year in business) that will be logo number 3.

I reguarly buy domain names that I think are relevant to what I do and point them at the main site.

I have bought a new domain and will need some holding pages set up but won't have time myself so yes I would pay £350 for a website.

[EclipceCreate]

Hi all,

What about how efficient a web design company are?

Some developers could churn out a technically good 3-page web site in a single day, and struggle with the design. Some designers can get a spot on design for a client within hours, but then struggle with the development.

If you have the right team behind that £350 quote, then it makes more sense. If I was in a situation where I had to justify a low price to a client, I would simply tell them that, "We can undercut the competition because we work smarter and we work faster."

Russ

[Richard Conyard]

Sometimes it's hard to bite your tongue / stamp on your fingers before responding to some of these messages over cheap web design.

Attempting to do so, if a company wants to spend £350 on a website then good on them. I hope they get what they want, if they don't then when they have topped up their budget there are a number of firms that would more than happily write something else for them from scratch.

After more than 10 years in the industry (that's that's just me - not adding up everyone in the company like lots of £350 a site companies), more household names that you could shake a stick at on my CV and the realisation that time really does equal money I wouldn't recommend that level of expenditure to all but the most hard up start-ups that are expecting to get any business from the web. If you want to make the web an effective outlet for your business then you should be willing to spend appropriately to do so.

That said there is a market and a reason for template sites, of which there are a couple of good posters here that will sell you one for < £100. Since that's all you're probably going to get for £350 why waste the extra £250.

[herif]

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[MinuWeb]

A number of people have already spammed these forums with .ws pyramid sales b******t in the past

[JoyDivision]

It would be nice if a mod could delete it as I don't think it has any place on this thread.

[stagetec]

Your web site should work for you, it should become part of your sales team and you should set sales targets as you would a member of staff - so what is £350?

It's nothing, not only way too cheap, but also totally the wrong attititude - anyone looking at building a new web should be looking at it as a long term project and budget accordingly.

Andy

[bci]

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I wouldn't pay £350 for a website. Far too cheap.
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Maybe so. But often, price has little to do with quality - you could pay ten times as much and still end up with the same site! Or even worse - end up with a lesser site!


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.... When we upped the price we found that we actually got more business.
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My point precisely!

[crus]

Interesting thread,

the reason I stopped building for clients was this reason, but the market has moved again.

Everyone wants something different ,from what I'm hearing.

Not saying this is such an offer, but many companies offer a template that you can buy for next to nothing, hashed with your company data for around this price, or a rehash of someone else's site.

Now for some this will work, but for many there is no point in spending the money for a compromise, eg £350 will barely buy you any SEO, so whats the point in having a site without it in the searchengines?

But again, horses for courses.

D

Then again, I did just build a 'friends' letting website for a very low 4 figure sum, with hosting and domains, so it can be done, her next best quote was £5K.

[quotes4]

This sort of service/product is only going to attract new business people who perhaps haven't experienced the real costs of running a business.
My company also provides a starter site package (although more expensive than £350) as you have to in order to appeal to those companies who are looking for a quick and cheap start to their on-line existence.
Once companies have been around for a while and have tried other forms of advertising and marketing then they will soon realise that they need to invest more into their website as they begin to realise the value of having a good, well optimised site.
If you can get them on board early with a low cost site then you are more likely to get the work to improve the site later on.
That's my theory anyway.
But overall the web design market is very competitive thus the reason behind us moving towards the quotes4awebsite.com site.

[Coding Monkey]

Hmm, shame I missed this one. I've had people contact me wanting a website, then I'd call them back the next day (as they'd e-mail at night) and by that time find they've already got a website for £99. But this is often a very straight forward method, as every client of mine has a great understanding of their business and the importance of what I'm doing, whether or not I educate them about the benefits (which I do), because they're aware of the perception of presentation. These are the successful companies I want to be dealing with.