Website design costs – part 1

Businesses work within budgets – so establishing HTML website design costs is often the first factor for businesses looking to go online or update their website.

E-creation has put together a 3 part guide to website design costs to clarify the cost of the 4 stages in professional website design. This is based on our experiences, and whilst E-creation is not the cheapest website design agency, we believe we offer the best value, throught the quality of service we offer.

Website design & development costs vary between agencies because of different profit level objectives, different level of skills and / or have a different understanding of client’s requirements. A lack of understanding have can a massive impact on a website design budget. It is common to hear of an agency quoting one price at the beginning of a website development and for the costs to double 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.

Because E-creation has worked on fix price budgets for over 15 years, we are accurate at estimating website design costs. We simply can’t afford to get it wrong – so we don’t.

Is price a true reflection of agency’s quality?

There are good website design agencies that are inexpensive and bad website design agencies that are expensive. Value is not about the lowest cost. Value is getting what you need at a price that beneficials the business. If every time you invested ┬ú1,000 into your business, it returned ┬ú2,000 – that is good value, even though you are spending ┬ú1,000. But┬áif an investment of ┬ú10,000 was to return ┬ú20,000, that represents even better value even … though more expensive.

Is the ┬ú300 website my brother’s barber’s 19 year old son likely to be any good?

Generally, you get what you pay for and the ┬ú300 website sounds suspiciously low. Is the work done in the UK? Do the website designers understand what is actually required? What is the quality of the design & coding like?┬áWe understand that for clients who receive a low quote, that price becomes the “anchor”. This can make other quotes seem expensive but which might be offering 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 size of business (and website development budget) to yours for a realistic comparison. E-creation has created websites for SME’s for ┬ú1,000 and websites for larger corporations with budgets over ┬ú50,000.

Obviously, there is a big difference in quality of design & functionality between those websites.

Starting things off right

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 have weeks, even months allocated for initial consultation & documentation.

Ballpark idea of website design 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 of a hypothetical basic 15 page website with open source CMS & good quality website design …

Continue to┬áWEBSITE DESIGN COSTS (PART 2)