Website Development Costs?
 

Hi,

Could anyone let me know what current website development costs are? Do companies charge by the hour or fixed fee? This would be for a simple website consisting of, for example, home page, contacts/location map, services offered, gallery (where client can manage photos), guestbook, blog, limited product line/pages linked to Paypal merchant services.

Price to include all image editing (but not sourcing) logos and photos, but does include creating menu elements/images, boarders etc. Text provided by client.

I've no idea what this sort of thing would cost or how it would be charged. What would be the appox range?

Cheers

It varies sooooo much,
I was quoted between £500 and £1500
One person on a forum wanted nearly £4k :cuckoo:

You looked at doing it yourself using Wordpress?

You would be looking at around £1500 for that from me. Not saying that's the price others would charge, but that's the cheapest I could do it for and still make a top job of it.

You could actually have that done in Wordpress or the likes which would probably make it cheaper, but things can get fiddly with product purchasing.

The commerce part adds £1000 for me.

You can also easily build a professional commercial site yourself using services from sites such as www.1and1.co.uk, www.reason8.com or www.intuit.com. You don't need to know how to code and you can use their predefined templates to get your site up and running quickly.

Thanks chaps. I'll take a look at wordpress. But I thought that was just for blogs?

No, it was originally, but has moed on tremendously since then.

It is more of a full code management system these days, but what I would say is take a view as to whether you want the site to expand ecommerce wise in the future as if so you may be better going with a more bespoke or ecommerrce orientated system now.

Wordpress is great, but the ecommerce plugins are a bit basic... not a criticism of it as it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.

Wordpress has some excellent e-commerce plugins. Woocommerce, by Woo Themes, is a good place to start looking.

As a web developer, Wordpess is really good but I advise caution when it comes to using as an ecommerce solution. The general issue is that you will have to keep Wordpress up to date to ensure its secure, which will in turn will mean that the ecommerce solution will need updates. This normally ends up causing problems at some point in future.

Woocommerce I have used, and many others, but all I would avoid if you are doing it properly. A dedicated ecommerce site would be my advice. Budget £1,500 plus

A basic site is quick easy and cheap to provide. The cost element is the e commerce side if things. It's time consuming and sometimes difficult to set up depending on which way you do it.

I think estimates of £1500 to include the E-Commerce are not far off the mark. Anyone quoting much cheaper than that I would avoid as they probably have no idea of the work involved.

Also have a look at:

SimpleMachines forum with Simple Portal.

here's an exmple:

www.britishmarauders.co.uk

I've not tweaked it much, it's pretty much out of the box - took an hour to set up.

Yea I'd say from £1500.00 for a site with basic e-commerce features on Wordpress, there are many plugins so it shouldn't be too difficult to find one that works exactly as you'd like (as long as your products are simple to purchase).

Alternatively you could look into Magento and the like but I believe that they're overkill unless you intend the site to be dealing with a high amount of traffic and orders and want complex payment / shipping modules. They also cost a lot more to develop properly.

I'm not sure on advertising services etc on this forum works but have a look at my portfolio http://pulseight.com and get in touch if you'd like a more accurate quote. (Sorry mods if this is against rules!)

If you're wanting an e-commerce system then the only off-the-shelf CMS (Content Management System) I would recommend is Umbraco (an ASP.NET application which narrows you down to Windows hosting companies), otherwise a specifically built e-commerce system like magento or any other shopping cart system (there are LOTS of them) would be a better idea.

Don't be tempted by those cheap nasty do it yourself things from companies like 1&1. The uninitiated might think they look good but they are nasty applications that make you look cheap. If it's for your business, and the best you can do for your online window-on-the-world presence is a free site-builder template, then that says more negative things about your business than list of bad comments on an online forum ever could because it says that YOU don't care about your business.

Thanks for the additional info. More for me to look at :) I'll have a look at those CMS' you mentioned and see if there will work out better than wordpress. I've looked that the templates you get with the likes of 1&1 etc and I didn't like them. They didn't have the flexibility I wanted.

Cheers

I have setup several sites for eccomerce for maximum £500, the main cost is if you want lots of changes made to functions and additional things for the site to do. The other main cost is if you get a specialist involved the costs can be massive, I was quoted something like £350 to £500 per day for a UK e-commerce company to work on a new site for me, I decided to give them a miss!

That's not a bad price. Think about it. You're charged around £70 per hour for a main dealer mechanic (£560 per day), or £90 per hour for a heating engineer (£720 per day) so £500 per day isn't bad if it's about your online business presence and for an income generating web site. Many site developers are highly skilled and highly qualified individuals and easily warrant that money. It's like many things, do it yourself and it's only your time, get an expert it costs a lot of money, get someone new to the business and you'll pay less but get less experience and "nous" at the same time.

I think a lot of people have got into a mind-set that everything on the internet is free so if it costs anything at all to do with the "web" them it's too much (not saying that's how you think). Skilled people cost money, and that applies to all areas.

Joomla over wordpress for me
plenty of add ons for what you want on there

that said, there is more to a site than just putting one online

and don't go near these freewebs types

I agree. Although there are free / cheaper alternatives to building an e-commerce or normal website, there are plenty of benefits to hiring out a professional.

For example, if I were to build a website I would be optimising it for SEO, setting up Google Analytics / Google Webmaster tools and ensuring the content is optimised for Google (good internal links / heading tags and keywords). I would also be looking at page load times and optimising images and scripts to load quickly and properly on the website. Although this is now second-nature to me it is things that are completely overlooked when new to the web-design world!

You also have to take into account the best way to display the products and shopping carts to maximise conversions and sales. Simple tweaks here can reap great rewards!

In essence, you could have two websites that look equally professional. One's built using a template and a simple knowledge of Wordpress. The other's built by a developer and all of the above and more has been taken into account. Without fail the developed site will outrank in Google and sell much more!

Do you need it designing too? I don't see any mention of it in the brief and getting a proper layout done by a good designer will add to the cost - its worth it though, they'll have plenty of experience in what works and what doesn't in terms of ease of use for customers and overall user experience (sometimes called UI and UX).

That's probably even more important with a commerce site as you want someone designing it who knows how to present your products in the best way possible to get people actually buying! Obviously a nice design also adds to user confidence - how many times have you found the exact product you're after on a ropey looking site and not bothered in case its a dodgy company? You don't want to be in that situation.

If you can, avoid using Paypal as your merchant as their fees are quite high. We use Sagepay for our clients sites (which also allows you to tie in a Paypal account if you really need to offer that option) and the integration time (linking your site to the merchant) doesn't take any longer. You do need to get a internet merchant account from your bank though, but that's not hard to do. It's probably also worth thinking about how you're going to do things like raising invoices and stock control - do you have a system in place for that or do you need the site to do it for you?

The site itself doesn't sound too complex, but you'll find you get a huge range of prices depending on who you go to. A big agency price for what you're asking would be £3k+ as their overheads are higher, but don't be fooled in to thinking the higher price means a better site, it doesn't always. Plenty of smaller companies have skilled designers and developers and will offer a better rate. A portfolio of previous work including sites similar to yours is a must-have. If they can't demonstrate anything... I'd walk away.

As has been mentioned there are quite a few ways for you to do this yourself and plenty of people do, however I think the people who make a good job of their first attempt are few and far between! Its a good way to dip your toe and learn a bit, but in reality if you want a professional web presence you need it doing properly.

Don't let anyone try to blind you with technology - they might waffle about how they use HTML5 or CSS3 or Ruby... but these are just programming languages and its how they're put in to practice that counts.

Bit of a brain dump... sorry... hopefully something helpful in there!

Don't think anybody has mentioned it but do not discount the importance of a mobile/tablet friendly website these days.

The two sites I work on both made it to more impressions from mobile browsers than desktops for the past two months and this month looks to be the same.

If your site doesn't work well on a mobile/tablet then that's probably half your potential business gone to a competitor.

Depending on the complexity of the site you can probably get away with a single site for all devices be it desktop to phone using a well thought out responsive design.

Cheers

Ian