Looking for web site designer

[karm]

Hi, have called a few web designers to get a website written but they all gave very different quotes. One is way too high and another is so low that i don't trust it.

All I am looking for is a 5 page website that i can edit myself, that has a map of my location, and a services page, photo gallery, contact page and about us page.

One quote was £100 another was £600?

What should I be paying?

 

[Paul Norman]

There is, of course, no absolute answer as the two persons may be providing a very different product. I would actually say that neither of them should be dismissed as 'silly' without conducting some more investigation as to what you are getting, and also without being very specific (you may already have done this) about what you are expecting.

If you wish them to work up an original design, for example, as opposed to choosing from an array of templates, that would make a significant different to the time it would take them.

 

[zigojacko]

It's not so much what you want on the pages but the level of customisation/bespokeness of the design and functionality. That is what you pay for, the skillset in actually designing/developing. There's millions of so called 'web designers' / 'web developers' that can install Wordpress, install a theme and make a few tweaks/install a few plugins. And they'll charge either next to nothing or way more than the effort and time they'll spend on it, largely depending on how much they think they can get away with. But if this is all you need, you can learn to do this yourself pretty easily.

If you want a bespoke design or a fancy theme, built from the ground up, with a very particular site flow and functionality, then you can expect to pay upwards of £500 for the skillset that someone has in order to implement.

Anyway, hope that's of some use...

 

[Faevilangel]

Depends on what you want, £600 for a website that you can edit yourself is on the cheap side (imho) unless you want to do it all yourself as the hosting and domain names would be £50, so the £100 job only actually becomes £50.

For a 5 page site which you can edit yourself you should be paying between £400 and £2000 depending on functionality, the developer who made it (experienced or new to web work), custom design or template based etc

 

[ryedale]

As others have said, if someone quotes £100 , then they are only going to do a standard of job that you could do yourself and you're unlikely to receive much in the way of ongoing support.

 

[estwig]

up to £2k for a 5 page site!!!

What's it got solid gold taps!!!

 

[fisicx]

Or....

You could install wordpress (free) and a theme (free) and some plugins for the map and other features (free).

What you are paying a developer for is their skill in configuring all the above and adding any features not covered by the above.

A simple WP install with a simple theme shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred pounds. If you start asking for extras then the cost goes up accordingly.

 

[Faevilangel]

up to £2k for a 5 page site!!!

What's it got solid gold taps!!!

it's like buying a car, you can get a reliant robin with no air conditioning, a tape deck and 3 wheels or you can get a BMW with every mod con and 4 wheels.

 

[Kixo]

also look at support and hosting costs. A lot of people say they want to edit it themselves but get stuck then need the web hosting people to make some changes to the template, at which point it can costs a lot. also hosting, it should cost a lot but some companies charge a lot.

Shop around and same as what everyone said above. Don't go with one man bands or foreign companies, they disappear way to quickly! Go with an established company. 10 months from now you want to change something and the one man band got a full time job somewhere else and suddenly your site is now thier weekend job.

I'd say £500-£600 is prob what you'll pay for the right company to do the right job, but you could pay more or less. Are you paying them to design your branding as well? lot of people now think designing a site and your logo and artwork is the same thing. For branding as well you could be looking at £800-£1000

 

[Paul Norman]

it's like buying a car, you can get a reliant robin with no air conditioning, a tape deck and 3 wheels or you can get a BMW with every mod con and 4 wheels.

I agree with Faevilangel here. £2000 buys you between 4 days and 8 days of time. If that includes a finicky design, the cost could easily get to these levels. Likewise, if you want a very basic level job, it is obviously a lot.

 

[Cameron Ziafat]

£600 sounds legit to me. We wouldn't charge much different from that for a basic 5 pager.

If it's a stock theme you could probably do it yourself or pay a freelancer less than that £600 figure but themes are only good if you are willing to fit your content around their design and functionality. We avoid customising themes where possible.

 

[pbeard18]

As someone who used to do freelance web design a bit, £600 for a freelancer seems good. If you got that quote from an agency, then I would think twice.

Bare in mind, agencies are always more expensive. Freelancers are a one man band. If they can turn the site over within a couple of weeks, then thats good for the client and for them, aslong as the quality is good.

As for the £100 site, it would be low quality 100%. Again, probably a freelancer who has a pack of templates. All he/she does is add your logo and content and it takes about 3 days. it's shoddy at best.

Make sure you look at portfolios, contact people who's websites they have made before. Ask how they were, whether their service was good etc...

 

[Palani Kumar]

I think it all depends on the quality you are expecting, last week one of my client (I am basically an Digital Marketer) redesigned a new website which was just a single page website with all functions on a single page, and he said it was very cheap at £ 1000. As a Digital Marketer I will say it was cheap price for the quality of detail and functionalities included.

So to me it largely depends on your budget and requirements, for a small business I will recommend something between £ 800 to £1000 as a good price.

 

[UKSBD]

A lot depends on the content you provide.

If you have 10 identical sized, sensibly named, well arranged photos, the gallery can take 10 minutes.
If they are random sizes, badly named, unarranged the same gallery can take 2 hours.

If you have text for an about page that can be copied and pasted in - 5 minutes.
If you want the text written - an hour

Same as above with Services page.

A lot depends on what you want to do afterwards too, do you just want it handed over to you, or the person to still be responsible for hosting, updating, giving you lessons on updating, etc.

It really is a how long is a piece of string question
£100 and £600 could both be right

 

[estwig]

Sorry fellas I'm not wearing the £2k for a 5 page website thing at all!!

Make all the comparisons you want between BMWs and Robin Reliants, unless you got a gun and a balaclava under your desk, it's b*ll*cks!!

 

[karmafunk]

You could try using a quote service to get a good range of quotes.

Google "Web Design Quote Now"

 

[SugarCubeProductions]

My websites start at £500. That buys 1 days of designers time and 2 days of developers, and a years hosting with us. Thats the lowest we do, and it's not fully customised.

90% of the time in making a website is in the first page, as thats the one with all the design that, the headers, footers, layouts, etc. Once that page is done, the rest follow the template and are very easy to do. If the website has a CMS (mine do) theres an add page button so that customers can add a new page when they want and it'll follow all the pre-built styling.

If you want something thats bespoke, you'll be looking closer to the £1500 mark as it'll take a week of designers time to do all the initial concepts, and the back of forth in editing them to be how you want, before a single line of code is even written. Then you have the custom CSS and JS that has to be done to make it all work.

There's an awful lot of work that goes into making a website from scratch.

 

[am:pm graphics]

As you'll have no doubt discovered, there are plenty of web designers out there! Always have a good look through their portfolio and you'll get an idea if they will be able to produce a site you are after.

I would always communicate with them about what you are after and ask them questions. For me the initial contact speaks volumes. Do they reply to your emails quickly? If a company is slow to respond at this stage, I would be concerned about their speed of getting things done and in particular making changes to the site once the bulk of the work has been completed! We hear lots of stories about web designers who are hard to get hold of, or take ages to make changes.

If you find a web designer that has a portfolio you like, their communication is good and the price falls within your budget, I would go with it whether it's £100 or £1000. I would never select on price only.

Let us know how you get on and what you decide!

 

[antropy]

Sorry fellas I'm not wearing the £2k for a 5 page website thing at all!!

Make all the comparisons you want between BMWs and Robin Reliants, unless you got a gun and a balaclava under your desk, it's b*ll*cks!!

There are too many assumptions going on here. "5 page site" gives no information at all about what that site will do. It would be possible for a "5 page site" to legitimately cost far more and far less. It all depends, broadly speaking, on 2 things:

1. How much design and branding work is involved.
2. How much technical work is involved.

We can address 2 quite easily because in this case it just seems to be a Content Managed website, so a platform like Concrete5 or WordPress would provide this functionality nicely.

So with this particular site, it's the design work that could get expensive. The OP doesn't say if a logo and branding are required, but these are things that could legitimately cost quite a bit on their own, hundreds of thousands in fact for a large corporate company, but certainly hundreds if done very well by an established designer for a small company.

Consider that the BP logo cost $211 million, accenture paid $100 million and the BBC over £1 million for that simple logo: http://www.businessinsider.com/here...-iconic-logos-cost-companies-2013-3?op=1&IR=T

Did they get value for money? Probably not. Is £2k expensive for a decent job of design/branding and CMS website build? No.

 

[estwig]

Now we have strayed into logo design and branding to try and justify the £2k for 5 pages scenario.

A flash animation could also swallow up £2k, before getting off the drawing board, but it's not a 5 page website.

 

[antropy]

A flash animation could also swallow up £2k, before getting off the drawing board, but it's not a 5 page website.

Ah so you do understand.

So without knowing any more about the project than that it has 5 pages, how can you say there's no Flash animation/illustration/photography/interaction/3D/JavaScript that would make it cost £2k?

 

[liamx1234]

do it yourself! i did mine myself really cheaply

 

[Paul Norman]

do it yourself! i did mine myself really cheaply

I notice, from your picture, that you do removals. My advice to everyone here would be to move yourself - it will be much, much cheaper than getting the professionals in.

 

[antropy]

I notice, from your picture, that you do removals. My advice to everyone here would be to move yourself - it will be much, much cheaper than getting the professionals in.

I agree, Paul. I moved my own piano only last week.

 

[Paul Norman]

I agree, Paul. I moved my own piano only last week.

I think that has gone rather well.

 

[antropy]

I think that has gone rather well.

Haha yes. I mean some people said it was only half a job but what do they know?! At least my new neighbours don't complain about my 6am practice now.

 

[liamx1234]

not bothered if people move therselfs as i have enough work

 

[antropy]

not bothered if people move therselfs as i have enough work

The point is, can they do as good a job as you?

 

[liamx1234]

well i am a pro!

 

[antropy]

well i am a pro!

I don't doubt for one minute that you and your team could move everything in a house 10 times quicker and with 100% less damage to stuff than me and my guys could. But I'd wager we're probably a little more handy at Photoshop/HTML/PHP/SQL/CSS/WordPress and SEO than you

 

[DesignForge]

well i am a pro!

a pro spamer... 3 posts with no real information

back to the subject:

If this is a simple website with CMS (with no flash animation worth £2k ), which I assume it is by the description, the key role will play the design.
If you want original design, that you can be sure no one else has on the web, and more importantly which works really well with your website's spirit, then you will need £500+.
If you don'y bother with being genuine in this matter, then you can get a nice looking (but not original! at least design-wise...) website for a £100.

 

[Cameron Ziafat]

This thread has gone on the same trajectory as that piano.

 

[fisicx]

Especially as the OP hasn't been back to the forum since they created the thread.

 

[stugster]

flash animation

But we're not going to go with flash because it's terrible!

 

[ADNattan]

Maybe OP is trapped under a piano?

 

[Deleted member 248628]

I would say anything under £600 is way too low for a quality job. And I would definitely ask about hosting, domain names and most importantly, support. Servers go down, new content is needed and it's easy to accidentally break the formatting on a web-page, so you need to be sure that someone's ready to respond when you need them.

 

[PIers Ede]

Interesting thread. Personally, I would suggest spending the 600 (at least!), if that's your top budget. As with buying a car, you're paying for design, functionality, reliability, usability and so forth. Unlike a car, the website has also to contribute to your livelihood. When I see people trying to run their businesses off free web builds like 1 and 1 of Wix and then wonder why nothing's converting, it's hard not to say 'what did you expect!'

Let's take Apple as an example. Beautiful designs which have changed the world, and incredibly simple. How did they arrive at this ground breaking simplicity? By spending a fortune and employing the best designers in the world.

If you're setting up a blog then by all means build something yourself. But if you're building something which is intended to convert business for you day after day then invest in the services of a web designer who knows their stuff.

 

[karmafunk]

Have you tried webdesignquotenow.co.uk? It's free.

 

[GoldenLeads]

Adding content to the wp theme is not a website design. I would suggest you getting someone who know what they're doing, and could help you later on if some problems arises with your website.

 

[HazelC]

I work with Geek Designs in Peterborough, they could do a 5page website for about £500-£600 and that would be with training on how to use the site and has a free 'contact us page' and free hosting for the first year.

£100 is way to low, unless it's based on monthly payments to keep it going.

I would recommend you speak to a few people and see which ones you get on better with and which you seem to click with. It's hard to choose one without speaking to and getting to know them.