Website Re-build

[SmilePrint]

Anyone in here like to give me a sensible price to re-build my website?

It is essentially to be a sales process, most traffic is driven by offline efforts.

It is to explain the product and build credibility, most of the required things are there, just need a bottom up re-vamp.

Further details/ brief available by PM.

Thanks

[FluxServices]

Anyone in here like to give me a sensible price to re-build my website?

It is essentially to be a sales process, most traffic is driven by offline efforts.

It is to explain the product and build credibility, most of the required things are there, just need a bottom up re-vamp.

Further details/ brief available by PM.

Thanks

Between £50 and £100 includes SEO updating pm me some more details...

Cheers

[SmilePrint]

WOW,

I really didn't expect a price as low as that.

are you sure you understand the work involved Elite?

Its hard to belive anyone could do what I'm asking for that price.

Can you elaborate, would you like to see the existing site, read the brief?

PM me.

Regards

[NuBlue]

Its hard to belive anyone could do what I'm asking for that price.


I would look for a company that asks you what you are trying to achieve, who you are trying to target etc.. before giving you quotes.

Looking at your existing site we would quote half a day just to re-sitemap the site and architect the information for you. Anyone throwing out quotes, sub £1000 to plan (yes plan :)), design, develop and test a website is not worth considering IMHO

[zoezoe]

WOW,

I really didn't expect a price as low as that.

are you sure you understand the work involved Elite?

Its hard to belive anyone could do what I'm asking for that price.

Can you elaborate, would you like to see the existing site, read the brief?

PM me.

Regards

I think that must be a joke!! don't get too excited!

If you want a sensible quote then you need to provide some sensible information - feel free to PM me with teh full brief and we can get back to you.

[Esk247]

i always tend to go on budget these days...i'm gettin tired of saying 'thats going to cost around £500' and they roll there eyes..wanting it for a tenner.

anyone here will need to write up a quick specification for you, send it to you with the quote for that actual work and you say 'yay' or 'nay' ... you can also compete then on price by comparing the quotes and full specs.

there are lots of web designers on here who can help you out. if you need more quotes just let me know and i'll phone round my northern lot to see what they can do.

[zoezoe]

i always tend to go on budget these days...i'm gettin tired of saying 'thats going to cost around £500' and they roll there eyes..wanting it for a tenner.
.

Thats made me laugh. I am fedup with this also. I think sometimes that people think I can just press a button and hey presto a perfect website just gets built. If I charge £500 its because it will take a couple of days to write.

I had a someone ask me recently to SEO his flash website. There was no reason for the flash - it could have been reproduced in pure XHTML. I quoted £500 to re-write the website - keeping the original design with a few tweaks, SEO for a couple of phrases (not very competitive ones) and included a CMS, hosting etc. his response was to ask me to half the price and then he walked! £250 would not even cover a days work, how on earth he thought that we could do all that work in a few hours I just dont know!!!

[alphanumeric]

Hi feel free to PM me the breif etc.

thanks
Dave

[Interconnect IT]

I used to get upset about low-ball offers and low-ball rivals.

Now it doesn't bother me. If a client doesn't understand then you can't force them to do so. And I'm not going to work for them either.

Similarly, if a rival wants to offer work for pennies then why not? It's rather like selling a Porsche and complaining about the scrap-yard down the road selling barely legal bangers for £200. Ultimately, the scrap-yard is only going to steal sales if you get somebody really really stupid who knows absolutely nothing about cars and can't tell the difference between the banger and the Porsche. I wouldn't want that sort of client, so why should I worry about losing them?

Once I realised this and got our company concentrating on selling on quality, features and professionalism and never on price, life became a lot easier and less stressful and, curiously enough, we got better contracts. My out-of-office day rate is now where it was in my ERP days, yet we do WordPress which is full of low-cost rivals.

[SmilePrint]

Thanks all for your input!!

As you are mostly web designers talking here, I see it from the customer point of view.

1; Its incredibly difficult to see something thats not made yet

2; Its incredibly difficult to differentiate between Mr A, who will build a website for £199 and Mr B who will build a website for £899, IF you don't know much about web sites.

3; Budget is important, if I could have had the £899 site for £199, (assuming sites are truly comparable) and just not put £700 profit into a greedy web designers hands, then I'd rather pay £199.

Don't be offended by this, this isn't to get at bona fide web designers here, but my experience is there's a lot of charlatans (out there) who will do exactly that.

I've seen some truly awful website that companies paid stupid amounts of money for. And while its easy to say its their own stupidity, they often see all web designers as having the same credentials.

My reason for posting here, was to get good designers who can take this task out of my hands and do it completely satisfactorily for a completely reasonable rate.

There is always an aspect of uncertainty in awarding a job, and thats where portfolio, testimonials etc come into play.

I trust you already know this and are working to help clients and potential clients understand the difference.

[wood1e2]

A new design should be developed with what the client has requested, their likes/dislikes.

It should be W3C compliant. Creating a clean and understandable website for the end user...

If it is not to late, PM me the spec of what you are looking to have created...Although I have to agree with InterconnectIT.

[YODspica]

there's a lot of competition in the web design business, but don't be afraid to take on new ideas offered from by designers it may set you apart from your competitors positively.

[Interconnect IT]

I've decided to stick to car analogies:

If you're buying a car it's important to do some research first. It's not good saying "I want a car" but instead you need to come up with either a detailed specification or looking at what others have and asking for that.

Otherwise you only receive based upon the assumptions of the person selling to you and/or what they need to shift that day.

[xpressdesigns]

I have PM'd you about this thread

[mooredale]

[QUOTE]2; Its incredibly difficult to differentiate between Mr A, who will build a website for £199 and Mr B who will build a website for £899, IF you don't know much about web sites./QUOTE]
Mr A & Mr B could still produce identical websites, but Mr A might work from home and take 2-3 days to finish, while Mr B has an office and staff and other overhead costs and only takes a day to finish. There are lots of reasons prices are different, Low price does not always mean low quality, thats what the big company's want you to think.

regards Pete

[SmilePrint]

Agreed,

I'm finding it hard not to take some of the comments posted personally, but hey!

My main purpose was to use the forum as a sounding ground for sensible quotes to re-build a web-site.

If you think I'm a cheapskate by (mis)interpreting comments I've made, so much for understanding client needs.

If you want to try to justify overpriced work, and bash anyone who would consider buying quality at the best price, please just start your own thread.

This isn't about paying low rates to get low quality work.

Any web designers want to quote on a live job, reply or send me a PM

[awebapart.com]

1; Its incredibly difficult to see something thats not made yet
It certainly is, it is also difficult for a client to ask for and describe exactly such a thing, and for a supplier to describe exactly or quote for such a thing. Descriptions are always open to interpretation. This problem isn't just related to web builds, it also crops up if you want a custom made extension to your house, or even if you want a new haircut.

With bespoke custom-made web builds, especially complex builds, you have to take into account this difficulty, by putting in place a client-supplier contract (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=372601) and perhaps a flexible project methodology (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=247800), in order to minimise the chance of receiving something that either isn't what you want, or something that is what you said you wanted but not what you really wanted.
My reason for posting here, was to get good designers who can take this task out of my hands and do it completely satisfactorily for a completely reasonable rate.
You cannot get designers to take the task completely out of your hands, because client involvement is so important, without it it is impossible to deliver what the client really wants.

[janerikpaul]

Prices vary either because people are trying to make a different level of profit, have a different level of skills and / or have a different understanding of your requirements.

There are some good digital design agencies out there who are relatively inexpensive and other bad agencies that are very expensive. I think that it really does come down to what you get for your money - £150 for a website redesign does sound suspiciously low in in my opinion. Is the work being done in the UK? Do they have a good understanding of what is required? What is the quality of their work like?

Perhaps a best first step is to ask for a relevent professional reference from the agency? Try to get the agency to match up the turnover levels with yours, so that you have a realistic comparison (we for example have done websites for SME's for under £2,000 and some websites for larger corporations for over £100,000).

It may be difficult to image how there can be such a difference in cost, but put simply, a larger budget allows more time and resources to be allocated. The initial consultancy stage is incredibly important, as it creates a stable platform for the development of:

content
design
code
delivery
Ok - as I have started to write this now, it looks like this might turn into far too detailed a posting, so I will close this off here, and write it fully, and post it somewhere as a unique thread.

I will post a link.

[janerikpaul]

Website design & development prices vary because agencies are trying to make a different level of profit, have a different level of skills and / or have a different understanding of client’s requirements. It is not unheard of for an agency to quote one price at the beginning of a website development and for the costs to triple at the end.

This generally comes down to inadequate planning from the start and one of the key reasons that we always recommend putting in place adequate budget at the start of a project for initial consultancy and documentation.

Is price a true reflection of an agency’s quality?

There are some good digital design agencies out there that are inexpensive and other bad agencies that are expensive (even more so because they deliver poor quality products – doubly bad value). Value does not come down to low cost, value comes down to getting what you want or need at a price that is beneficial to your business – after all, if every time you invested £1,000 into your business, it returned £2,000 – that is good value, even though you are spending £1,000. Yet, if investing £10,000 was to return £20,000, that better value even though it’s more expensive!

In general, you get what you pay for and a £150 website redesign (as we have heard quoted) sounds suspiciously low. Is the work being done in the UK? Do they have a good understanding of what is required? What is the quality of their work like? For a potential client, if they have received a low quote that becomes their price ‘anchor’, then all additional quotes that might be in the thousands can seems like bad value, but can offer much better value when viewed from a return on invest perspective.

Perhaps a best first step is to ask for a relevant professional reference from the agency. Make sure the website design agency matches the referee’s turnover levels to yours, so that you have a realistic comparison. E-creation has created websites for SME's for under £2,000 and also created websites for larger corporations with budgets over £100,000. References must therefore be carefully selected in order to provide realistic expectations.

It may be difficult to image how there can be such a difference in the cost of designing a website, but put simply, a larger budget allows more time and resources to be allocated. Many smaller businesses have ‘till shock’ at the initial consultancy costs for the start of a project. However, the initial consultancy stage is incredibly important, creating a stable platform for the development of:
• content
• design
• code
• delivery
Without adequate consultancy, discussion and documentation, most projects are doomed to fail. Larger projects many have week and even months allocated for initial consultation and documention.

[janerikpaul]

So what is a good ballpark idea of website development costs?

The ‘average’ business website would have between 10 and 30 pages of content created in HTML with contact form, some search engine optimisation, easy-to-use navigation and some basic animations throughout the site to engage with visitors visually. So let’s estimate the cost for a hypothetical basic 10 page website with quality design.

Consultancy & content

There should be around 5,000 words of content (500 words per page minimum) with each page targeting three specific phrases. These phrases should be researched in search engines like Google in order to accurately target the best terms for you business.

This leads to clear content guidelines for the pages plus naming conventions for the pages themselves and can take several days on its own. A larger site, one with hundreds of pages, would take longer to ‘rationalise’ as access to content becomes more complex, as the navigation structure must work within a 'deep' content environment.
A good ballpark for the consultancy for a 10 page website would be £1,500, broken down into:
• 1 day for project consultancy & brainstorming
• 1 day to document the projects requirements & expectations
• 0.5 day to research other sites, terms in Google

[janerikpaul]

Design

The creative process is perhaps the most difficult stage to pin down in terms of time scales and costs. If the client has a clear idea of what they want from a design perspective (and can illustrate it through other example websites, print materials and/or brand 'values'), the design process becomes quicker (and therefore costs less). However, if the client is looking for the creative agency to do all the work ("just make it look nice"), then there is more time and cost on the part of the agency.

Good creative design needs time to mature and develop otherwise the resulting product can be 'shallow'. In our experience, for the average 10 page website for a small sized business, the ideal balance of cost vs. creativity is:
• 1 day to consult, information gather and brainstorm with the client
• 3 days to create design concepts
• 2 days to artwork content pages
I can absolutely promise you that you will see the difference between brilliant quality design and poor quality design - it really is the difference between light and dark.

If branding is involved, then a further three days after the consultancy stage is required, bringing the overall design process to two weeks (a rough budget of £6,000).

These are broad generalisations of the design process and businesses in general. You only need to look at the breadth of businesses in the UK, to get an idea of the breadth of potential costs associated with a website development.

[janerikpaul]

Multimedia details

Once you introduce multimedia & interactive elements, costs become significantly more 'spread' because of the types of technologies involves and the relative work required to make each perform.

Flash has become a common element in websites, helping to lift the design of website page by bringing animation & interactivity to the content. It is possible to create a short 10 second intro animation for a website for a cost of £600 but does this actually add value to the website? It is doubtful.

A series of animated components distributed across various pages of the website might cost more (perhaps £1,500) and in spite of the higher cost, deliver much better value in the form of a better experience for website visitors.

Video can very quickly communicate the 'values' of an organisation, but can incur significant frontend costs in terms of the creation of the video. However, cheap video cameras and home editing software, means that it is possible to high impact create video testimonials from clients very cost effectively.

Interactive navigation provides a good, cost effective element to your site, as it is going to be used by site visitors many times and therefore becomes one of the most ‘noticeable’ components of the website, yet applying creative flair to the navigation should not cost much in terms of design & coding time.

[janerikpaul]

HTML coding

Putting together simple HTML pages doesn't take long or cost much. A simple HTML website can be code in a day, but again, the risk to your brand can be high. How often have you visited a website and immediately gotten the impression that the website was put together by someone’s “brother in law” or a student? Did you continue to investigate that business as a potential supplier? No.

So why take that risk with your own business? The small details on the webpage are obvious signposts as to the quality of HTML code that businesses are likely to recognise. A well constructed, modern website is accessible (even if at the most basic level of users being able to set the size of the print), quick to load (but with the prevalence of broadband these days, an agency would have to be making some fundamental mistakes for the site to be slow to download), use CSS (making it easier to update the design across all pages of the website from a single file) and readable in all browsers.

Writing good quality HTML code does not rely on tools such as Dreamweaver. The job of these tools is to make writing code easy – but unfortunately, this is often to the detriment of the code quality itself – so ask the agency what tools they use to create their code. If the agency is writing code from scratch, then it is likely to write better quality code and
to have a better understanding of how that code works.

For our fictional 10 page website, the cost of producing quality, well constructed HTML code would cost on average £3,000
• 1 day for setup of CSS, navigation & overall page layouts
• 1 day to chop-up graphics for the pages
• 2 day to write HTML code with quality details (such as meta tags, alt tags on images, code comments)
• 1 day for testing

[janerikpaul]

Setup & installation

Website hosting is cheap as chips these days. It is possible to find hosting for as little as £5 per month. However, there are costs associated with setting the account up, purchase of domain name, putting the website online & testing. These costs are likely to vary depending on the complexity of your website but again, using the 10 page HTML model website, the whole process shouldn’t take more than one day.

Ongoing maintenance costs

Keeping the content on your website up-to-day is essential – absolutely critical. Research indicates that after design, the most important factor in deciding the quality of a website is how often and how recently information on that website has been updated. People return to websites that update their content often and search engines ranking sites that update content often more highly.

The consultancy process should identify the best approach for keeping content up to date – whether a content management system is recommended or if it is more cost effective to edit HTML or text files directly. This may sound like a technical process, but it doesn’t need to be. A couple hours of training, especially with a website that has only ten pages, is often all that is needed to put you in the driving seat – saving you on development & implementation costs.

[janerikpaul]

Overview

The overall cost for a professional, quality 10 page website constructed in HTML can be broken down as follows:

Consultancy £1,500
Design £6,000
Programming £3,000
Setup & installation £600
Ongoing maintenance DIY and pay nothing!

Inevitably, the quality of your website and its business performance will be reflected in its price, but this does not mean that more expensive is necessarily better. We often hear of companies charging many £10,000’s of points for websites that can obviously be created for much less.

Larger agencies have higher overhead costs and work on larger margins than smaller agencies. There is a sweet spot in terms of website development cost that is unique to you, so make sure you get at the very least three quotes for your project (and ensure that all the website design agencies has the same understanding of your requirements), but ideally try to target five quotes, from around the country.


Phhhewww - that's it for me.

[SmilePrint]

Overview


Larger agencies have higher overhead costs and work on larger margins than smaller agencies. There is a sweet spot in terms of website development cost that is unique to you, so make sure you get at the very least three quotes for your project (and ensure that all the website design agencies has the same understanding of your requirements), but ideally try to target five quotes, from around the country.


Phhhewww - that's it for me.


Wow,
Jan Erik Paul

Thanks

I like to think of myself as quite clued up already in terms of understanding my needs , and the possibilities, but you have certainly made absolutely clear the considerations of choosing a web designer/ company.

Its a pity most small businesses are too busy doin it doin it doin it, as Michael Gerber says, to take even a moment to understand this; hence we have sites built to the designer's eye with no attachment to the busienss in view.

I've had some very useful insights here regarding my site already, and I do Thank you ALL for them.

I can only trust the information garnered here and the contacts made will result in a powerful tool for my business from here on.

Once again, thanks to all who have contributed.

[banilla]

Hi,

Feel free to forward me details if you are still looking.

We provide professional web services at a very reasonable price.

Regards
Leigh

[wood1e2]

A website should always be developed with the end user in mind, no point having a great design if no-one can fiugure out how to use the website, let along increase sales...as that is what it is all about.

[SmilePrint]

After all the bluster, I've received 3 sensible quotes.

All 3 have taken the time to understand my thoughts on direction, feel, target market etc.

And I've had 2 strange quotes from India which are between 3 and 6 times MORE than these sensible ones. (I've also had one from India which is 1/10th of the sensible ones!!)

An interesting array of opinions in the thread, but a surprise that a number who received the brief didn't reply at all. (So far!)

[Kev Jaques]

From looking at the forum posts re varying degrees of service, ability, skill sets, price etc... Would it not make sense to collaborate?

At least possibly from a coding point of view, why not setup a part of the forum so that designers/developers could peer review code snippets or larger sections of code so everyone can learn and make the web a better place.

I've seen a lot of posts here where everyone chips in their opinions and entitled to but none of that helps to make everyone work from the same page. I'm sure if it was well organised and people on the forum worked together and helped each other so everyone can learn then we would all be contributing to a greater goal.

I'm not talking about everyone creating whole websites for free here but peer reviewing code that people have concerns or lack of understanding about.

For those who have worked in teams will know where I'm coming from, your team is as quick or as effective as its slowest member, but if you all took the time and effort to support one another then things get done and the team thrives.

Just an idea to throw into the pot ;)

[Kev Jaques]

Hey TBD

The problem I see here on this forum is people are bringing it here with all their questions which is why I mentioned a separate section, there are other sections on the forum for specific things, surely it would make sense to keep it in house and on topic to deal with issues or concerns people have when they come to this very forum.

Yep the net has tons of sites that already do this kind of thing, but seeing as people like to help one another it would make sense to keep them here rather than pusing them to other forums where more confusion can occur.

It's not just about techies though, it's about raising awareness and helping for all

Can see your point of view on this though, however, my above reasoning seems valid hence me mentioning it ;)

[ukperson1]

Generally speaking I would go for someone who seems more honest rather than someone who is a smooth-talker.