Cost of building a website

[rickyhyde89]

Could anyone tell me roughly how much it would cost to have a website for a car dealership built? It would need to have an option for customers to filter cars by make, model, body type ect... and also a section for customers to input their info for finance applications.

 

[jacobc]

You would probably be looking at around £1000 depending on exactly what you wanted. Bear in mind it will range from £500 - £5000 depending on who you get to actually do it.

£500 - one (wo)man in his/her bedroom
£5000 - an agency

Regards,

Jacob

 

[mjojom]

you should budget anywhere from 400 to 1500 quid. you get what u pay for it.

 

[faradaykeynes]

try Joomla with auto shop extention if you know how Joomla works

 

[serendipitybusiness]

How many cars are you likely to have on there?

 

[bargainmania]

So something like http://www.buchmanndesign.com/automotiv/
probably about £100 inclusive

 

[ukinsurance]

It depends on how you want your website to function, if you need to build it through some CMS like drupal or joomla then it would cost a little more. If you go to one of those freelancer websites, you may get a good deal.

 

[Amivbridge]

Building a website with a database of cars and search filters for users, admin functions for adding/modifying and deleting cars will cost around 1200. Finance applications depends on how many services we integrate with. I would say one service integration will cost 200-800, depending on how complex it is.

 

[ServWise]

As you can see a huge range of prices depending on your needs.

Probably better to ask yourself how much you can afford as you will generally get a better website the more you spend.

If your requirements match the features then it can be very cost effective to go for a ready made system written on a CMS like Joomla or Drupal. My experience says that in most cases they don't match but if you can bend to fit it can save you lots of money.

One warning with off the shelf CMS systems, they need constant updating to keep them secure as hackers are actively looking (and finding) bugs that allow them to hack sites.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

I would suggest Sellerdeck (shop in abox) would do all you require
Try a free download at www.sellerdeck.co.uk used to be called Actnic

 

[davidhg]

If the website is also going to be shop front for internet users - then you need to make sure the website is SEO'd both initially search engine friendly and on going search engine optimisation, so your designer / developer needs to understand this otherwise you are going to end up paying twice :S

Linked in can be good for referrals if you don't know any good web developers.

 

[ITsoldUK]

Could anyone tell me roughly how much it would cost to have a website for a car dealership built? It would need to have an option for customers to filter cars by make, model, body type ect... and also a section for customers to input their info for finance applications.

Cheaply - <£500
Adequately - £500 to £2000
Bespoke - >£5000

Too many variants and not enough specifics to go any closer than above.

Regards
Daren

 

[ITsoldUK]

If the website is also going to be shop front for internet users - then you need to make sure the website is SEO'd both initially search engine friendly and on going search engine optimisation, so your designer / developer needs to understand this otherwise you are going to end up paying twice :S

Linked in can be good for referrals if you don't know any good web developers.

That made me giggle...what else would it be then?



Just to clarify, a designer and developer can make the website SEO friendly but in this fierce marketplace I would say good luck finding a guy who can do this all under 1 roof and make the site fully optimised without outsourcing.

Many say they can, but few will deliver.

 

[davidhg]

Wrong side of bed ITSold?

The point was just that the website needs to be found...

Some people just want a website to link to for further information from a brochure or whatever and do not consider using the website to drive business in its own right. Not what I would recommend.

It may sound like an obvious statement, but so often it is over looked until the website is finished, then the client asks how do they get the website found!

 

[rickyhyde89]

Thanks for your input. It will be a free version of autotrader so we are aiming to have 5000+ cars on the site. I have a budget of £3000 - £5000 which will most likely get a good professional looking site going from your estimates, I though i would need a lot more than that to be honest. SEO isn't going to be problem, I know it is one of the toughest subjects on google so I plan to employ somebody full-time to do this.

 

[MartinD]

I was going to suggest the autotrader route but see you've just mentioned it!

In that case, there's nothing stopping you from running something like WordPress as a front end with a nice template over the top. Minimal expense, maximum exposure

 

[serendipitybusiness]

Yes I agree wordpress would probably be your cheapest, most flexible solution which will help as you grow the business. It does have its downsides, updates can be a pain but are necessary, so avoid custom development on core files as much as possible. It may also start falling down at 30K plus listings.

It is great for seo and interactive marketing though and it can become very feature rich and developers can jump in and out so you are not limited to one team and long turnarounds after the site has gone live. It is very powerful and there is a lot of information out there with community support and bug testing so out of the box you can get a stronger solution for your buck as opposed to custom development.

Also design wise you can save a lot of money and time by adjusting an existing template which gives you more control over the look and feel from the beginning instead of first trying to describe what you want to a graphic designer then getting them to reinvent the wheel and build a template from scratch. You can change a lot with a few well thought out tweaks. This also saves money in support and issues with bug testing as others are running it through the mill too.

However the downside is you need to be flexible at getting from point A to B to avoid lengthy upgrade protocols and possible conflicts as there are a lot of moving parts on a complicated build.

Depending on your specific needs and what you need on the customer facing side (the people that will be listing the cars). I would say you could get something really good with your budget using wordpress and a developer that knows what they are doing.

Hope this helps and please feel free to pm me with further details if you want specific advice on aspects you don't want to discuss in public or want a quick call to bounce off questions before firing it out for quotes. My son is off school today so I can't do anything that requires my undivided attention anyway until he goes to bed lol!

 

[ITsoldUK]

Yes I agree wordpress would probably be your cheapest, most flexible solution which will help as you grow the business. It does have its downsides, updates can be a pain but are necessary, so avoid custom development on core files as much as possible.

As a side dish to anyone reading this, the simplest and most effective way to ensure that the updates do not affect your customisation is to work on a child theme thus never ever touching the core files and you can develop 'til your hearts content and update with a swift click and no after thought...

Toodle pip
Daren

 

[FIZIX Agency]

Yes I agree wordpress would probably be your cheapest, most flexible solution which will help as you grow the business.

I'm not sure how you equate Wordpress as being more flexible than a bespoke job. When you go on to say this:

It does have its downsides, updates can be a pain but are necessary, so avoid custom development on core files as much as possible. It may also start falling down at 30K plus listings.

Although what ITSoldUK said is true, with WP you're going to need to do some pretty extensive editing with WP. To the point in which I would raise why when budget isn't a concern?

I'm not going to say you are wrong as such, but I'm certainly unsure whether a WP build would be the best approach for the OP's scenario and budget as we have it.

It is great for seo and interactive marketing though and it can become very feature rich and developers can jump in and out so you are not limited to one team and long turnarounds after the site has gone live.

It is very powerful and there is a lot of information out there with community support and bug testing so out of the box you can get a stronger solution for your buck as opposed to custom development.

Thats not exactly true, it depends who you hire and also what solutions you do use. For example, strong community and ease of finding developers is equally true of CodeIniter as it is of WP. You could also argue that you'll generally find more seasoned developers gravitating around CI due to it being a pure framework. It's also slightly over egging how good WP is from an SEO and marketing standpoint; sure it's true when comparing pre-built solutions; but with a bespoke solution it's hardly a task to match.

Also design wise you can save a lot of money and time by adjusting an existing template which gives you more control over the look and feel from the beginning instead of first trying to describe what you want to a graphic designer then getting them to reinvent the wheel and build a template from scratch. You can change a lot with a few well thought out tweaks. This also saves money in support and issues with bug testing as others are running it through the mill too.

BIB: Is not how original design works and is totally ignoring the benefits of an original, thought out, strategically lead design over a stock template.

However the downside is you need to be flexible at getting from point A to B to avoid lengthy upgrade protocols and possible conflicts as there are a lot of moving parts on a complicated build.

Depending on your specific needs and what you need on the customer facing side (the people that will be listing the cars). I would say you could get something really good with your budget using wordpress and a developer that knows what they are doing.

If a developer were to charge the OP's budget delivering a Wordpress website built on extensions, customisations and tweaks to a pre-built template my eyebrows would be firmly raised.

 

[serendipitybusiness]

I'm not sure how you equate Wordpress as being more flexible than a bespoke job. When you go on to say this:

Although what ITSoldUK said is true, with WP you're going to need to do some pretty extensive editing with WP. To the point in which I would raise why when budget isn't a concern?

I'm not going to say you are wrong as such, but I'm certainly unsure whether a WP build would be the best approach for the OP's scenario and budget as we have it.

Thats not exactly true, it depends who you hire and also what solutions you do use. For example, strong community and ease of finding developers is equally true of CodeIniter as it is of WP. You could also argue that you'll generally find more seasoned developers gravitating around CI due to it being a pure framework. It's also slightly over egging how good WP is from an SEO and marketing standpoint; sure it's true when comparing pre-built solutions; but with a bespoke solution it's hardly a task to match.

BIB: Is not how original design works and is totally ignoring the benefits of an original, thought out, strategically lead design over a stock template.


If a developer were to charge the OP's budget delivering a Wordpress website built on extensions, customisations and tweaks to a pre-built template my eyebrows would be firmly raised.

Here we go again! I will respond to this for the OPs benefit but then I will be jumping off this thread as I am not interested in getting pulled into another battle of the geeks .


1. Flexibility in availability of plugins not in custom solutions, not every feature has to be custom built so you can add and remove feature sets easily and by yourself in the future without needing to employ a developer for every task. This allows you more flexibility to take control and drive your business in the future without having to be dependent on timescales, budgets and programming teams.

2. It depends on how it is approached and the solutions readily available on the market place. Yes extensive customisation can be required but it is in most cases easier and faster to customise something that has been premade than write it up from scratch and therefore cheaper overall. Before my comments on not customising core files where possible come back to me on this please note the CORE part of the statement.

3 a) This is a comparison on project specific custom written code vs readily available plugins. Therefore one developer or development team and one customer with private correspondence Vs multiple users, multiple people testing and finding bugs and posting issues on public forums searchable through google.

- Okay compare most custom seo solutions and yoasts wordpress plugin. Much more out of the box than any custom solution I have come across to help support the user in optimising their content effectively, is free and takes a couple of minutes to install, redirection for avoiding dupe content, google sitemaps prebuilt in, related posts, tags etc etc all free and easily applied.

4. Yes this is how it works customer prepares a brief, they send that to the designer, the designer than starts to put together the concept, you go back and forth with design reviews until the client is happy, then you get the design coded. I have been to the rodeo many times and am fully aware of the process. With choosing a pre-developed template the customer can flick through an arrange of designs and see them in action on demos, get a feel for what they like and they don't like and 9 times out of 10 find something they love that just needs tweaking rather than investing time and money in the whole creative process. It doesn't mean it will be a worse solution just because it is built for general use or any worse looking it depends on the template/designer you choose.

It is horses for courses, yes original design is great and my intention was not to devalue the necessity in this industry for graphic designers. I understand their value on the right project and that of custom coded solutions. However the OP doesn't need to invest in an award winning designer to produce a bespoke design for this project, maybe for branding and on page visuals but not necessarily for the main framework. It is selling cars it needs to be clean, modern, engaging, user friendly and have the right calls to action which leans to an array of design solutions.

5. It depends on the specific needs of the client and how much work is involved, what extras they need, how organised they are etc etc. You may raise your eyebrows but until you have a signed off brief in front of you you don't know the clients specific needs and are therefore not in a position to judge. However your reaction lends itself to proving my point, the whole thing is cheaper than a bespoke development overall which allows funds to be directed to improvements rather than the core build!

I hope this clarifies the points made. I will duck out now and leave the rest of you to fight it out . Have fun!!

 

[Baz Watkins]

Q. How much?
A. It all depends on how much work there is and what the individual or company charge as a business rate to do it.

Think of a price and someone somewhere can do it, but realisticly for a UK built website expect to pay £800 to £4,000 for a freelancer, £4,000 to £10,000 from a studio, £10,000+ from a full blown agency.

As for how, it all depends on who you choose, and what they prefer to use. All in all do your research, talk on the phone, check portfolios and so on.

There is an alternative way of thinking, which is of cost in relation to ROI. If you spend £5,000 and sales go through the roof, its money well spent, so maybe look at what you need exactly, look at your business plan and see where the website comes in. If everything is done through your website, spend properly on it, after all your livlihood may depend on it.

PS. this is not an endorsement of expensive websites, more a statement that a fit for purpose website thats marketable and capable of generating a return should be viewed not from just the pricing perspective.

 

[FIZIX Agency]

You are correct that you can add/remove plugins to your hearts content and reach your end goal more easily (and thus at a lower cost) I never denied that.

My questioning was that, when you are deviating a significant way away from the natural functionality of a solution like WP; when the budget is there to go bespoke; why go the WP route. The arguments are not "geek territory".

The quality of plugins for WP is erratic, they are 3rd party so you cannot guarantee ongoing support and you can introduce problems.

The issue of keeping those plugins up to date and keeping the core solution up to date is actually a serious consideration and while you can keep costs down in the immediate term it can become a major burden later.


To use one example; I came into contact with a community a fair few years ago that was running on vBulletin; this was very heavily customised; it had a completely original skin on it and loads of plugins.

To put some context to it. vBulletin was at that point a pure forum. It was one of the most feature rich forums but it wasn't at all comparable feature wise to how Invision is today.

The extent of their customisation wasn't a million miles away from the scope of Invision today. We're talking user photo galleries, blogs, a public site with gallery postings, a social networking element, news articles and a backend publishing suite, loads of custom user features and a heap of other stuff.

Basically it was taken from a pure forum to a fully blown community and article website that was deeply integrated; built from a custom made theme that they commissioned and features via various plugins from vBulletin.org; some in their stock form and some customized further.

As time went on they couldn't upgrade vBulletin (actually leaving them wide open to some serious security flaws, and also preventing the site from staying modern and current) as most of the plugins were unsupported on the newer versions; in fact they had became unsupported for some time as older plugins had become unpopular in favor of newer ones. Or because the developers of the original plugin had lost steam.

The custom templates were not supported (although that would have been easier to change).

The plugin problem however was more serious, while alternatives that were compatible with newer versions of vBulletin had become available the problem came down to data compatibility issues.

The benefits when they started out suddenly became a huge burden as bringing it all up to date became a big cost issue and in some cases were data compatibility show stoppers.


What's important to consider with 3rd party solutions is that you do need to keep them up to date, as the code is known and thus exploits can be found more easily. There are a heap of other things too; but that could be considered "battle of the geeks" territory.


With a bespoke solution you don't have the open code issue to worry about and if the application is well developed with consistency then it's easier to keep modern and up to date through ongoing development than a pre-built solution with loads of extensions that underneath all the gloss create a rainbow of coding styles, code and data structures and standards.

4. Yes this is how it works customer prepares a brief, they send that to the designer, the designer than starts to put together the concept, you go back and forth with design reviews until the client is happy, then you get the design coded. I have been to the rodeo many times and am fully aware of the process. With choosing a pre-developed template the customer can flick through an arrange of designs and see them in action on demos, get a feel for what they like and they don't like and 9 times out of 10 find something they love that just needs tweaking rather than investing time and money in the whole creative process. It doesn't mean it will be a worse solution just because it is built for general use or any worse looking it depends on the template/designer you choose.

It is horses for courses, yes original design is great and my intention was not to devalue the necessity in this industry for graphic designers. I understand their value on the right project and that of custom coded solutions. However the OP doesn't need to invest in an award winning designer to produce a bespoke design for this project, maybe for branding and on page visuals but not necessarily for the main framework. It is selling cars it needs to be clean, modern, engaging, user friendly and have the right calls to action which leans to an array of design solutions.

I'm sorry I can't actually agree with that. The primary benefits of original designs over templates are (in no particular order):

1. Identity
2. Strategy
3. Relevancy
4. Originality

Not; oh that's pretty. Templates also tend to be very, very generic. Most designers can spot a template a mile off.

May I ask why the OP doesn't need to invest into an original design (citing award winning designers is taking it to the extreme)?

5. It depends on the specific needs of the client and how much work is involved, what extras they need, how organised they are etc etc. You may raise your eyebrows but until you have a signed off brief in front of you you don't know the clients specific needs and are therefore not in a position to judge. However your reaction lends itself to proving my point, the whole thing is cheaper than a bespoke development overall which allows funds to be directed to improvements rather than the core build!

Oh I can agree with some of that. Using WP could bring the costs down; my statement was whether you were charging bespoke price for a WP build and stock template tweak; that would raise my eyebrows and rightly so.

If the WP build happened to cost the same as bespoke development due to development effort then that would be a totally different thing. But would also raise other questions would it not?

I hope this clarifies the points made. I will duck out now and leave the rest of you to fight it out . Have fun!!

It was never my intention to fight it out and get into a battle of the geeks with you or anyone else. I was simply questioning a reasoning as I am not entirely convinced it's the right reasoning.

It might be the easiest or the cheapest; but not necessarily the right reasoning.

 

[effectivewebdesign]

If you're using a standardized system for this, it can be quite cheap, since only the design has to be done.

If you want someone to code the whole system, it will be alot more expensive.

 

[Paul Norman]

I worked for 18 years in the motor trade. I have been involved in a number of website projects relating to motor trade businesses ranging from single sites to international groups.

If you want some serious, knowledgeable advice on this top, feel free to drop me a line. I urge you to disregard most of the above!

 

[Glowbridge]

Yes this is how it works customer prepares a brief, they send that to the designer, the designer than starts to put together the concept, you go back and forth with design reviews until the client is happy, then you get the design coded. I have been to the rodeo many times and am fully aware of the process. With choosing a pre-developed template the customer can flick through an arrange of designs and see them in action on demos, get a feel for what they like and they don't like and 9 times out of 10 find something they love that just needs tweaking rather than investing time and money in the whole creative process. It doesn't mean it will be a worse solution just because it is built for general use or any worse looking it depends on the template/designer you choose.

You aren't technically wrong, themes can provide an array of options and there are situations when some tweaks gets it doing exactly whats required. The flexibility to change themes and plugins is great, the problem is that many themes and plugins are themselves very inflexible and I find that the themes that clients are attracted to most tend to be of the heavily niche and incredibly inflexible variety.

Then rather than choosing a more general theme they will keep looking until they find a theme that looks like a complete representation of what they want their site to be and these tend to be the ones that are incredibly bloated because it's set up to let you choose between 4 pre-made layouts or to turn things on and off instead of actually putting stuff where you want it.

Unless you plan on doing pretty much exactly what the live demo does you're setting yourself up to spend your days picking through a completed product that houses 4/5/6/more variations within and all the junk to switch between those variations.

If the clients definition of 'tweak' is sufficiently loose (Which it normally is) this can end up being much more hassle than it's worth and as time goes on it's a problem that's just going to get worse for the client. Every successive developer they hire has to pick through the original theme as well as all the changes made by other folk.

Going from nothing to exactly what they want is often much more efficient than taking a complete product and stripping back or modifying until you get what you want. Good developers have libraries and shouldn't even be starting from nothing anyway.

 

[Alan]

I think the OP (in one of the posts) was looking to compete with Autotrader.

If this is a serious business targeting with a serious plan, all the advice given so far is all a bit cheap and tail wagging the dog.

My experience of projects in that order of complexity would burn over £20,000 in just project management, information architecture (sitemap to those that are unsure) another £20,000, functionality coding including all forms of testing £??,???, user experience testing £??,???, look and feel design , wireframes, template coding £??,??? (everything is a template by the way).

Sure, there are cheap short cuts, but ....

 

[FIZIX Agency]

I think the OP (in one of the posts) was looking to compete with Autotrader.

If this is a serious business targeting with a serious plan, all the advice given so far is all a bit cheap and tail wagging the dog.

My experience of projects in that order of complexity would burn over £20,000 in just project management, information architecture (sitemap to those that are unsure) another £20,000, functionality coding including all forms of testing £??,???, user experience testing £??,???, look and feel design , wireframes, template coding £??,??? (everything is a template by the way).

Sure, there are cheap short cuts, but ....

I would agree with you IF I believed that was seriously the case (that the OP is seriously looking to compete against AutoTrader with a true like for like or better service offering - with everything that development and the marketing of it entails). In fact, if they wanted to seriously compete on that level, forget 20k; they would be looking at a fair bit more than that.

I have experience with sites in that order of magnitude and beyond; and they have never come through open forum posts. They tend to come through agencies, referral (usually some kind of referral in my experience), direct to provider or more specialist sources.

In fact I don't know of a single provider who has experience in those types of project who use forums to pick them up (because you're fishing in an empty lake); they may check on the off chance of something coming up, but forums tend to be a fishing ground for smaller, simpler projects.

Sites posted on general communities tend to be more of the entry level, SME trying the water, SME with entry reasonably simple needs or the shoestring variety. Very occasionally it does happen, but it's rare.

Also, when on the rare occasion they do come up; they stand out a mile off. People with serious money to spend and the drive to create something serious like that, approach it in a particular way; not the way 90% of these posts are put forward.


Someone referencing another site stating, "Like x site" doesn't mean "compete with", it means "functionally similar x site" - that achieves the same basic need.

At that level, Autotrader isn't a technically comprehensive or particularly advanced website and can be bespoked or Wordpressed in the thousands by lower cost providers.

 

[Alan]

The £20k was just to employ a project manager to start pulling it all together.

Your point is well made, but I did bother to look at the OPs other posts and it seems the OP is serious about the venture, not just another bedroom wananbee that will put up a Wordpress site with a cheap template and a classified plugin and wonder why they only get two visitors a day, then give up.

So I think it does a dis-service to the industry to say sure £500 to £1,500 when some of us that have worked on and managed multi-million pound projects know that is just daft.

It might be a forum where the vast majority of people are not prepared to invest the sort of cash needed to seriously attack certain markets, and I accept that point. I just don't like misleading people.

 

[FIZIX Agency]

The £20k was just to employ a project manager to start pulling it all together.

Fair enough.

Your point is well made, but I did bother to look at the OPs other posts and it seems the OP is serious about the venture, not just another bedroom wananbee that will put up a Wordpress site with a cheap template and a classified plugin and wonder why they only get two visitors a day, then give up.

OK; I didn't check out their post history; but I would say; it isn't an all or nothing scenario; you have the shoestring budget - testing the water; the brand or serious & funded startup and everything inbetween. You can be serious but on "a budget" in the greater scheme of things and get things done - in the immediate term anyway.

My general point was that I don't expect posts on forums to exceed a certain threshold as it's so rare for them to do so.

Therefore I assume them to be below that point unless something leads me to believe otherwise.

So I think it does a dis-service to the industry to say sure £500 to £1,500 when some of us that have worked on and managed multi-million projects know that is just daft.

I wouldn't say that. If you had a £100,000 or more to spend on a new website or service. Would you post it here? I think most people are savvy enough to know that it's unlikely that kind of project will flow through these places.

It might be a forum where the vast majority of people are not prepared to invest the sort of cash needed to seriously attack certain markets, and I accept that point. I just don't like misleading people.

I'm circling your point a little here, but I will get there.

The reason these types of project don't turn up on forums like this is not the cailbre of provider that is here and I believe there are businesses here with those kinds of budgets to spend (and have done in the past). The parties are in place to do that kind of business. What's wrong is the staging ground.

I've seen some uber high profile agencies posting on sites like FlashKit and SitePoint; I've also seen brands pop up on forums; so high caliber providers and clients do hang out in forums and the likes.

The turn off is that to tempt the capable into contact, you'd need to reveal enough to know that the project has a high budget. If I were to post a project up and indicate it has a £150,000 budget; I'd get an unmanagable response and 90% of them would be inappropriate for my needs and a good portion looking to scam me I am sure.

So I wouldn't do it, it's too open. I'd go through other sources like vetted tendering agencies; I'd look up agencies from credible sources or through reference etc.

I would never post it on a forum and I think most people would expect that and that most people know that this is a broad industry ranging from bottom market sites with near zero budgets through to multi-million ventures and what the difference between the two are (or are aware that there is a difference).

Therefore I don't think it is a disservice; me stating that you could get a bespoke job done at £3,000 doesn't devalue anything; it's the bottom line, not the top end & that it's unlikely the thread starter would seriously be gravitating in that direction, and I think people are intelligent enough to know that.

Anyway, I fear I have derailed enough.

 

[Baz Watkins]

If the client is at enterprise level, they will go with an agency who has a history of delivering on projects of such scope.

If the client is a small garage with hopes of being something more, then £5k to £30k might get a foot in the door, although further investment would be required.

 

[Talay]

If the client is at enterprise level, they will go with an agency who has a history of delivering on projects of such scope.

If the client is a small garage with hopes of being something more, then £5k to £30k might get a foot in the door, although further investment would be required.

I do think some businesses need the top notch sites but others, where the products are not as homogeneous, can probably get away with far less.

 

[james04k]

It's up to the website design. Do you want a simple website having simple html and css or you want a fancy website using flash and other things. For your situation $1500 will be enough.

 

[itsoftmake]

I'd have developed for 2500