Web Site
 

How do I go about setting up a web site for my business,and how much is it likely to cost.Just basic,contact details,about the kind of work we do,etc
TIA

How long is a piece of string?

You'll find people who will do it for beer money and you'll find others who wont do anything for less than 3k (my company). You do get what you pay for. One man bands will be cheap but designers generally can not code and coders can generally not design.

A lot of work goes into design, if you want something based on a template (as in reuse an existing design) then this will be cheaper, but you still need someone to tweak it and add content.

Before you start, make sure you have a clear idea of the areas you think you want to cover, what sections, draw out a site map, similar to a family tree. This will help you get prices.
Smaller sites can be quite costly due to the upfront design and time to build the structure.

We normally produce 3 home page design concepts and refine your ideas in one that then defines the look of the site, we would design each high level page and sub page to suit the content and take the time to work out the best solution, others won't they will just shove your content in a basic CMS like Joomla/Drupal and that's that. That initial design process can take around 4 days, take an average of £50 an hour (£400 a day) and already you are at £1600.

Once you have built a sound structure, adding more pages then becomes much cheaper, for example a site with a home, a services and three service pages is almost as much work as a site with a home, 10 services and 100 subservices, the subpages will look similar except for images and content so whilst the small might cost x the big one would still only cost x*1.5 (crude example)

I would seriously question the ability of anyone who quotes you around £500 to design and build something but that's just me. It depends what you want and how much you want to invest.

Content is massively important to search engine rankings, more=better but that's not the end of it, content needs to be well written to contain your key words and phrases.
Building the site can be done in many ways, some will use Frontpage, some Dreamweaver, personally I think there is no substitute for doing it by hand. Cut out all the extra rubbish these tools add.

Thing is to be good at design or good at development takes time, some have invested countless hours in improving their techniques and there is no one right answer.

You get what you pay for and IMHO, buy cheap buy twice!

Good luck and I await the "I'll do it for £50 and a bag of chips" brigade to appear ;)

PM me if you want more info