Difference between a £200 website and a £2000 website?

[JamesMason67]

I was browsing some web design companies online looking for some idea of costs for an approx. 15 page website. Was looking at some who were quoting £200 to £400 for said site and at the other end of the scale some were looking for 2 grand for the same size site. I really couldn't see any aesthetic or functionality differences between both sets of examples so Im a bit puzzled.

Would love to hear what "extra" you get with a £2k site over a £200 one at the same size. Anyone help? Cheers

 

[The Byre]

£1,800.

 

[fisicx]

quality of graphics, code, responsiveness, back end functionality, support, upgrades and all sorts of other things add to the costs.

The £200 could be a bodged theme edit that doesn’t work well on small screens and has a whole load of junk code that slows down the site.

On the other hand, the £2000 quote could be from someone who doesn’t really want the job.

 

[JamesMason67]

£1,800.

Yeah very good lol

 

[JamesMason67]

quality of graphics, code, responsiveness, back end functionality, support, upgrades and all sorts of other things add to the costs.

The £200 could be a bodged theme edit that doesn’t work well on small screens and has a whole load of junk code that slows down the site.

On the other hand, the £2000 quote could be from someone who doesn’t really want the job.

These were advertised prices and not quotes from the vendors. Thanks for the info G

 

[fisicx]

Some people charge that much because they are very good at their job. Some charge that much because there are enough people willing to pay more.

You use lime mortar because it's a better product. Others will use a cheaper product. You charge more even though it looks the same as the cheaper fix.

Go for the cheap developer and you often get a cheap site that looks OK but is full of garbage code. This affects load speeds, ranking and even conversions.

 

[Mr D]

Sometimes you can get a decent site for £200.
Sometimes.
On the other hand you may get only slightly better site for £2k. Sometimes.

Best way I've found is track down other sites the company has done and examine those sites, ask questions of those companies.

You soon find who does buggy sites and who does well presented sites that meet requirements.

 

[andygambles]

Consider the cost in time of building a site.

Lets say the web designer wants to earn £25,000 per year. Lets say they also have to pay for computers/devices, maybe an office, internet connection etc. At a bear minimum they need to bring in £30,000 a year.

So that is 150 sites a year they need to produce. Then lets say 4 weeks holiday a year (inc Christmas bank holidays etc). Then lets give over 1 day a week to admin and marketing. That gives us 192 working days a year to produce 150 websites or roughly 1.3 days per website.

£200 gives you a website built in a day.

£2000 gives you a website built over 10 days.

Personally I would say if you are spending under £2.5k on a website you might as well use a builder like Squarespace / Shopify / Weebly / Wordpress Template.

 

[JamesMason67]

All excellent points gentlemen thank you.

£200 gives you a website built in a day.

£2000 gives you a website built over 10 days.

This part makes sense to me and what I was hoping to find out was what I was getting in these extra 9 days work. If it will rank better because of coding improvements etc then I can see the benefits. Just hoping for some info to make a decision on which price point to be looking at.

 

[Mr D]

Just hoping for some info to make a decision on which price point to be looking at.

Ask.
Find the sites you like the look of, ask them who did the site and how much it cost.
Explain why you are asking and ideally don't ask your competitors.

 

[Toby Willows]

Consider the cost in time of building a site.

Lets say the web designer wants to earn £25,000 per year. Lets say they also have to pay for computers/devices, maybe an office, internet connection etc. At a bear minimum they need to bring in £30,000 a year.

So that is 150 sites a year they need to produce. Then lets say 4 weeks holiday a year (inc Christmas bank holidays etc). Then lets give over 1 day a week to admin and marketing. That gives us 192 working days a year to produce 150 websites or roughly 1.3 days per website.

£200 gives you a website built in a day.

£2000 gives you a website built over 10 days.

Personally I would say if you are spending under £2.5k on a website you might as well use a builder like Squarespace / Shopify / Weebly / Wordpress Template.

That’s a damn fine theory until you come across the many chancers that will charge you £2.5k for a days template work.

Don’t go by price, ever, especially with anything web related. Personal recommendation is THE only way to go.

 

[andygambles]

All excellent points gentlemen thank you.



This part makes sense to me and what I was hoping to find out was what I was getting in these extra 9 days work. If it will rank better because of coding improvements etc then I can see the benefits. Just hoping for some info to make a decision on which price point to be looking at.

Most likely you will get the ability to have further input into the site. For £200 do you really expect the web developer/designer to let you keep making tweaks and amends to the final site? Even having a more than one meeting with you will probably mean all margin in the job is gone.

For £200 is the web developer going to spend time getting to know your industry, researching competitor websites, asking you about your goals and customer journeys?

Another point of view

£200 gets you a pair of hands

£2000 gets you expertise

 

[andygambles]

That’s a damn fine theory until you come across the many chancers that will charge you £2.5k for a days template work.

Don’t go by price, ever, especially with anything web related. Personal recommendation is THE only way to go.

I do not disagree. We turn down jobs under £2.5k because the budget simply does not exists to do the best that we can for the client. Recommendations and testimonials are so important we do not want to do anything less than our best.

 

[Bald Head Guru]

Well, the reason you can find two similar looking websites with such a vast price difference is more than likely because the cheaper one is probably built using a website building software like Wordpress, whereas the other one is custom built.

Determining how much to pay for a website can be complicated as they are so many things to consider. For one, your level of technical expertise. You will definitely need to constantly update your site for example. This would be easier and cheaper to do on a platform like Wordpress than on a custom-built site.

You also need to consider ongoing maintenance. If you're spending £2000 for an initial build, your ongoing costs will be proportional to that.

A good policy to keep in mind is to try and keep the cost of the website to around 20% of your total online budget. The real cost of being online is SEO and Marketing. After all, it's pointless having a fancy website if no one is going to find it.

I don't know enough about your circumstances to say definitively which path you should take but starting with a Wordpress site would be the more cost-effective option and does not put you at a major disadvantage in terms of aesthetics and code.

 

[fisicx]

Well, the reason you can find two similar looking websites with such a vast price difference is more than likely because the cheaper one is probably built using a website building software like Wordpress, whereas the other one is custom built.

That's a pretty bold assumption. A custom wordpress theme with bespoke functionality could easily eat up a £2000 budget. I'm busy with a wordpress plugin project right now that has an £800 budget.

 

[makeusvisible]

The cost generally dictates how much time the agency/freelancer will have to spend on your project.

For £200.....that obviously doesn't give them a lot of time. If you take a base price of £50 per hour, that gives them 4 hours.

£2k gives the provider 40 hours. So in 40 hours they can really get their teeth into the project, understand your unique goals, your audience and research competitors.

That said....not everyone who charges more does a better job. I've seen websites where the client has been charged £2k, and has been given a £25 template badly cobbled together.

We recently undertook a Wordpress project, where the end result is a 6 page site....and the cost was around £3k....which I know sounds expensive. Every page of the site involved sit down meetings internally to brainstorm the customer journey....we worked on and tested multiple colour pallets and provided the client with brand guidelines... we managed all content and liaised with external providers for bespoke imagery. These things all take time....and if you want someone to spend significant time on your project doing a good job of it....it comes with a financial overhead.

I've seen £200 websites generate leads....I've also seen terrible £2k websites which nobody would ever transact on.... it boils down to how much time your agency/freelancer is willing to spend on your project for the given budget.....and how good they are at what they do. Generally, if they charge £5 per hour they aren't very good, and if they charge £200 per hour they are very good...but it's crucial you make sure that the hourly rate matches the quality of the end product.

 

[Alan]

What is the difference between a George at Asda suit and a Savile Row suit?

They both have jackets, trousers, made of cloth and stitched together.

What is the difference between a Kia Optima and a Bently Flying Spur?

They both have 4 wheels, seat about the same number of people, can be driven at the speed limit in the UK.

 

[Mr D]

What is the difference between a George at Asda suit and a Savile Row suit?

They both have jackets, trousers, made of cloth and stitched together.

What is the difference between a Kia Optima and a Bently Flying Spur?

They both have 4 wheels, seat about the same number of people, can be driven at the speed limit in the UK.

A George suit is perfectly fine. Have worn one for every interview and 80% of the funerals in the past 20 years.
I'm taking a wild guess that Asda will sell a lot more suits than Savile Row will.

 

[JamesMason67]

Thanks for this guys. I take on board all that you guys are saying, but it is tricky for me, even after reading all your excellent points to decide whats right for me and my business when the sites in these very different price brackets look the same.

The car and suit analogy made by Alan doesnt hold water as the Bentley is clearly and very visibly better in every way to the Kia, and the Saville Row suit is obviously miles better. However looking at a 2 to 3 grand site and a 2 to 3 hundred site, there is no difference I can see. Most of the time.

 

[andygambles]

However looking at a 2 to 3 grand site and a 2 to 3 hundred site, there is no difference I can see. Most of the time.

I would suggest this is because 2-3k is still a fairly low budget. Comparing a 2-300 site with a 20-30k website will reveal an obvious difference.

As has been mentioned you then really need an ongoing budget. Ability to test impact of changing button colours, 2 or 3 column layouts, header optimisations, form layout tweaks all with the aim of increasing conversions.

Websites should really evolve over time rather than be replaced every 2-3 years. Otherwise you are not really learning anything.

 

[Chris Fickling Design]

Car analogy: Watching TV the other day I was struck by the price range of the Dacia Duster - from £9,495 to £17,395 - looks like the same car to me because I know very little about cars.

Websites: probably best illustrated by a situation I came across the other month - a website built on a certain platform that is widely advertised on here... the business owners contacted me about getting the site positioned, I ran it through some tools and was astounded to find that despite the site having visually available text, the text was not visible to google so google could not index any text from the site, nor could it index any images from the site because of the way they were formatted. I was truly shocked. On top of this, there was no geo-location information available (important on a local business website), there was no information schema, the copy was not optimised or structured properly, it was not speed optimised, no properly formatted sharing buttons, images not named properly, no meta descriptions, no properly formatted titles, no URL canonicalisation, no xml sitemap - the list goes on. It looked nice but had absolutely no chance of competing with even the most basic site in the same region or business sector. Needless to say I rebuilt the site and we're enjoying results at last.

 

[fisicx]

All of which is what others have been saying. It's what's under the hood that matters.

Too many cut price developers will use popular themes and create a nice looking site that then performs badly. A recent client had an overload of CSS and JS, 4 different google fonts and feeds from all sorts of SM sites so the site ground to a halt before anything got on the page.

 

[HazelC]

Often depends how much work is going into it and how much the skill the developer has. It could be a copy and paste template, or it could be designed from scratch, personally for you and never seen elsewhere.

When you collect quotes ask for the price and what they do for that price and you'll soon see the difference.

 

[Deleted member 59730]

The real difference between a good or bad website is the amount of time the client is willing to spend researching what he/she wants. A good brief gets a better job.

 

[Richard Boynton]

There are two points to look at in this post:

Firstly: Priced Charged

£200 websites are normally rule of thumb, pre-packaged. The designer has a template and imports in your information / details from the client or past website. Job Done. Very little extras are included.

£2000 websites (which are not that expensive) are custom designed. So bespoke templates / graphics / UX considered / on-page SEO / content added and created.

Also think of the type of company providing a £200 website? And the company providing a £2000 one. Ask the designers for a portfolio. Go onto these websites and see how they work, a 2k website should flow and interact with a user however a £200 I’ve not seen a great example yet. Ever been on a website before (usually plumbers site) that you think “I’ve seen this design somewhere else before” that’s because it’s a master template website.

Secondly: What You Are Willing Pay

It all comes down to what a client is willing to pay. You pay for what you get in web design.

Final Thoughts:

Any company that have “bespoke website prices” that are fixed RUN… the website company need to understand exactly what the client needs before you can quote. Then get this over in writing and confirmed. At this point things usually get changed around etc. The process of getting a truly awesome website is not a quick process. Both parties need to be on the same page.

 

[Alan]

The car and suit analogy made by Alan doesnt hold water as the Bentley is clearly and very visibly better in every way to the Kia, and the Saville Row suit is obviously miles better. However looking at a 2 to 3 grand site and a 2 to 3 hundred site, there is no difference I can see. Most of the time.

Well perhaps I should have picked closer cars, a VW Passat & a Kia. Equipment levels similar, engine similar, nothing that I could personally tell the difference about.

As others have mentioned, there is stuff 'under the hood' that people don't know about or value.

 

[Alan]

£2000 websites (which are not that expensive) are custom designed. So bespoke templates / graphics / UX considered / on-page SEO / content added and created.

You don't get much custom designing for £2,000. In many cases these are stock designs. The UK average design agency rate was ( in 2015 ) £680 per day. Less than 3 days work. The average number of hours in customising a stock design and building out a small website (in my experience ) is 40 hours ( 5 days ), so if you are paying less than £3,400 for a website you have to ask questions as to why is it so cheap ( and the answer can only be 'automation' or 'cheap labour' or 'cutting corners')

 

[Richard Boynton]

Alan, we have to disagree here. Our studio rate is £55 p/h and we have created MANY bespoke designs. With zero corner cutting, cheap labour. I find it quite insulting to say that sites cannot be created for less. If you have the expertise in-house sites can be created in a matter of days. Yes £2000 is cheap as explained before, but that completely depends on what the client wants.

If they want a 40 page, all singing and dancing site, £2000 is out of scope. But 5-15 pages with a simple design layout and all content provided. Not a problem.

Minus for some companies an office / advertising etc the cost can be lowered. Ive met many great developers / designers that charge low amounts (£20 p/h), and in-fact some "big" companies are known for using "freelancers" to lower costs and get a truly unique site.

Here is the issue... without the consultation its impossible to provide a quote. YOU cannot say its cheap or its expensive without the entire design brief. This sort of pricing is old tactics, like making sweeping statements about "cutting corners and cheap labour"

 

[fisicx]

If they want a 40 page, all singing and dancing site, £2000 is out of scope. But 5-15 pages with a simple design layout and all content provided. Not a problem.

Why would the number of pages make a difference to the price? Using a CMS means the number of pages is irrelevant. And adding a plugin for some bells and whistles wouldn't cost a lot either.

 

[Chris Fickling Design]

If we're offering copy-writing and on-site optimisation as part of the web design package then I'd say the number of pages is relevant and that just goes to show what a complicated subject this all is.

 

[Richard Boynton]

Fisicx - Are you serious?

Each page needs to be designed, created, tested. On top of that a unique title, meta description, H1-H6 tags. Content. The list goes on.

The layout is different, the contact boxes, images, videos...

Come on! Your telling me a 600 page website is as easy to make as a 10?

"Bells and whistles wouldn't cost much"

what a shocking statement. Bells and whistles could add 40k depending on what they are. Automated campaigns / None checkout basket collection emailing / intreated CRM systems.

No wonder clients do not know what they need and how much things cost with advice like this been posted.

 

[fisicx]

Each page needs to be designed, created, tested. On top of that a unique title, meta description, H1-H6 tags. Content. The list goes on.

Ah.. you are now talking about content. That's a whole different thing and not part of the £2K budget. Adding contact forms, images and video is again just content. Most pages (and especially posts) don't need any design - all you have to do is add the words and pictures.

Content is the client's responsibility. If they want to pay for content creation and SEO then they pay for that on top of building a website. Most developers/designers might add placeholder pages but very few will curate content.

 

[Richard Boynton]

Even if the designer / developer doesn't create content. Each page still needs creating and designing. Every page will not look the same.

 

[fisicx]

Every page will not look the same.

Why not?

If I have a thousand recipes for cake I want every page to look exactly the same.
If I have a thousand legal case studies every page should look the same
If I have a thousand galleries each one should look the same.

Legal, privacy, T&C and other admin pages should all look the same.

Go to just about any news site and all their pages look the same.

Changing layout between pages is an easy way to annoy your visitors. People like consistency, they don't want things to keep changing.

 

[Richard Boynton]

Wow! The pages are not the same. Each page has the same layout.

Does the information magically appear? No
The designer inputs the images / content (even if its written by another person)

So, this takes time to create. Even in WordPress - duplicate page - Insert images - insert content - Create new page description - End.

If you are doing this for 10 or 1000 pages would you charge the same? The difference in time to create 1 page or 1000 is vast! Even if the content has already been created or is copy and pasted over

Ive got a project on at the moment for 300 pages of content that has the same layout. If your charging the same for 1 page as 300 give me a call. We can sign contracts this afternoon.

P.S - Yes in some cases this process can be scripted. But it still needs checking and testing.

 

[fisicx]

The designer inputs the images / content (even if its written by another person).

No they don't.

Or to be more accurate, most designers don't - unless they are being paid.

So this maybe where the discrepancy in pricing comes from. If I build you a site and teach you how to add all your content it's going to cost a lot less than getting me to import and format everything.

If you have got 300 pages of content to import and doing each page by hand then you are doing it wrong. A decent CMS will have an import option. Set it all up on a CSV and press the go button. 300 pages added to the site in seconds.

I did this with an ecommerce site recently. They built the CSV (which once they got the hang of was very quick) and we uploaded the whole lot in one hit. Days of work was reduced to a matter of hours.

 

[The Byre]

There ain't 'arf some daft guff being posted on this thread! I'll deal with some of it in a mo.

In the mean time, we had this -

Well perhaps I should have picked closer cars, a VW Passat & a Kia. Equipment levels similar, engine similar, nothing that I could personally tell the difference about.

Try sitting in them back-to-back and driving them! The one (Kia Optima estate) is a bit cheap and naff, noisy unrefined engine, poor load space but reliable. The Passat is very refined by comparison, has loads of load space, the interior finish is in a different league, but it is not as reliable as the Kia. The funny part of that comparison, is the fact that they cost about the same - just £4,000 in it, if you bring them both up to the same spec.

But back to the Batmobile - I was looking for an AC tech to top up my car's system and pressure check the thing and right at the top of the list came a simple, 3-page, html site that somebody had built (he told me later) five years earlier and had not touched since.

Immediately after that, came a rather clunky and simple WP site from a local repair shop. Old-fashioned design, but it was there. I got the AC tested and fixed by the html guy, but I noted the name of the WP people and have since used them a few times for MOTs and repairs.

Surrounding those two, but having to pay vast sums for ads and PPC, there were all the usual suspects, the Dewee, Cheatem & Howes of this World that all do slip-shod work that has to be fixed later by someone who actually knows what they are doing. I am sure that the on-line campaigns for the likes of Halfords and Kwik-Fit cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, but their sites were listed either lower down than the cheap sites, or were expensive ads and PPC positions.

We learn from that one simple example, two lessons -

1. A simple site that is genuinely local can score better in the SEO stakes, compared to some all-bells-and-whistles magic site built by 'experts'.

2. Fancy BS sites, full of amazing content and design, can often fail totally to 'convert' a browser into a paying customer. (This is of course especially true, if you have a crap reputation!)
______________________________________

So, to sum up - and taken from my personal experience - here's a list of things a website is NOT supposed to do -

• Show just how amazing the web designer's work is.
• Help the web designer to get more work in future.
• Act as a vehicle for all kinds of amazing interactive features.
• Provide the viewer with an entertaining, informative, interactive experience.
• Give the website owner a vehicle for his views on politics, the weather, or indeed anything else that is totally irrelevant.

And here is a list of things a website IS supposed to do -

• Sell.

So, if you can excuse my bluntness, once again, in answer to the question 'What is the difference between a £200 website and a £2,000 website?' my answer remains -

£1,800.

 

[Richard Boynton]

If a designer or developer does not input images or content lets say on the home page? Product pages WHO DOES?

Ive never meet one company in 15 years who says make me a shell and Ill put in the information or copy and paste over everything from that website we wanted re-designing.You are delusional.

Your maybe use to working with very very small business owners. The mainstream companies do not have time or the want to input pages into their sites other than blogs. The CMS will allow this and documentation should show how to do this yes.

With some of the advice you give out @fisicx I'm surprised no one has called you out before.

Offer is still there for 300 pages of content for the price of one copying over. The client has a live site now with the information on it.

I suppose your CSV file will also show where in the page each image should go and pixel size? plus image description and ALT data? Great.

 

[Richard Boynton]

@TheByre I'd suggest reading up on CRO (conversion rate optimisation) and UX if you think a website should not:

"Provide the viewer with an entertaining, informative, interactive experience"

Im laughing at my screen even saying that out loud in our office!

THAT IS WHAT MAKES CUSTOMERS BUY - There experience on your site.

Ive tried UK business Forum for a few weeks, im struggling with this outdated and quite frankly shocking information been passed out

 

[fisicx]

If a designer or developer does not input images or content lets say on the home page? Product pages WHO DOES?

The site owner. Unless they pay you to do it for them. And that's why some companies charge more for a website.

I've not yet met a developer who looks after content. Their realm is code not content.