Template Website Price Guide
As a general guide, template website design prices start at around £245, and e-commerce sites start from £695. A quote on building your site or improving an already existing one can cost up to £139.
You can purchase a license for a template website for anything between £25 and £90, with the average price being around £42. If you wish to buy a template website so that you alone can use it, the unique price of a template will be between £1,350 and £1,900.
For a standard 5 page website prices start at £245. For this price you can expect to find a professional custom website design, unlimited design revisions, one year website hosting and support, domain name registration and management, unlimited e-mail addresses, professional stock photography, an enquiry form and visitor statistics. In addition you can choose to add a logo design, flash animated banners and search engine submission (SEO) to Google, MSN and Yahoo. Also, optional items include media players, estimation forms, an affiliate scheme and newsletters.
A 5 page website package with a content management system (CMS) is priced at around £395. This will include the above features, but will also contain a content management system that enables you to easily update your website. A 10 page website package (with CMS) can be found for £495, and a 15 Page Website Package (With CMS) will cost around £595. You can expect to have your website built within 3 to 4 weeks.
To purchase an e-commerce (online shop) template website package, prices will start at around £695. A deposit of £300 may also be required for projects such as these. Be sure to find a template that can handle company growth and increases in products. Features you should also look for are ways of displaying ranges of products, the capacity to add, edit and remove products, product management, monitoring of sales, and check that information can be collected on a database of what has been bought, how much, and the buyer’s contact details.
E-commerce sites include the features of the template websites above, in addition to the ability to update all product details (such as prices, pictures and stock details) from a web browser. This saves you from having to purchase extra software. Also, the inclusion of a content management system will allow you to easily update non-shop pages. Check that there are unrestricted categories and products, a choice of payment provided (eg paypal, worldpay), a shopping cart system, search functions, the ability to send an e-newsletter to registered customers, order history, the capacity for customers to leave product reviews, optimised coding and the ability to accept vouchers or coupons.
With e-commerce sites, the administration or backend functionality should include the ability to add/edit/remove categories, products, customers and reviews, image optimisation, support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products, stock management with low stock alert, a secure administration area and the ability to contact customers directly through email or newsletters.
The customer or frontend functionality should include storage of orders, order history and order statuses, account, search features, product reviews, email notification of orders and a checkout procedure.
Alternatively, you can find a feature rich website template with e-commerce facilities for £250 for a life- long license, or you can pay £20 per month for a license. With this, you can add unlimited pages to your site.
You can also find a starter package for £279, which includes a registered domain name, web space and hosting, and email account, customised design from a template, 6 content pages, visitor statistics, search engine META tags/keywords, submission to 40 search engines and W3C Pro coding by experts.
Bespoke website development (high-end custom websites) will cost considerably more than these prices. As a rough guide to pricing, custom websites can cost anything between £2,500 and £25,000.
Prices usually include domain (.co.uk), hosting and email for the first year, which need to be renewed annually. Renewals for UK domains are around £15, hosting is £40 and email accounts are £15. Extra features you may wish to purchase are a .com, .net or .org domain, which are an extra £10, and need to be renewed annually. Added extra images can cost £7 each, extra web pages are £40 each, a flash animated image gallery is £80, contact form enquiries are £55, a ‘link swap’ page with up to 20 links is £55, an extra email account is £15 per year, an integrated availability calendar is £15 and a testimonial page that features 6 customers is £55.
Another option when looking at template website is to use CSS website templates; these cost around the same as other templates (approximately £40). CSS refers to Cascading Style Sheets, and they are designed primarily to help separate document structure from document presentation and layout. The benefits of this include better content accessibility and more control in the specifications of presentational characteristics. Furthermore, CSS makes it easier to structure the contents, reduces the cost of maintenance and updates and also makes page loading faster.
