Website Design Prices
There are a lot of website designers and web design companies out there, and the price you will pay for a website design can vary a lot depending on the reputation and experience of the web designer or web design company you choose. While every web design project is unique, they can be labelled according to how complex - and therefore costly - they are. You can enter details of your project on this website, and web designers and web design agencies will respond to these web design leads. This article is a rough guide to the costs of website design for different kinds of projects, and reading it will help you judge who to choose when you request quotations through this site.
It is important for almost all businesses to have some kind of a presence on the internet. At the very least they should have an email address, and preferably a domain name and web address. However, not all businesses require a full-blown website design. The simplest kind of website is a single page, which is the equivalent to a business card or a printed flyer and should be a very quick and easy web design to build. It is important to realise that web design costs do not increase proportionally to the number of pages of the website, since the bulk of the work is in making the initial website design which can then be used on all pages of the site. As such, website designers will typically charge £200 or less for a single page website, though additional pages should be significantly cheaper.
The next step up from a single page, business card type website design is one with a small number of linked pages - maybe four or five. This is known as a brochure style site and is equivalent to a printed leaflet or booklet. Brochure website design is much more flexible than a real brochure, as relevant information can be cross referenced wherever appropriate, including links to external sites for background or extended information. Again, the bulk of the work is in creating the website design, which is used on all pages, so having multiple pages is not very much more expensive than a single page. A brochure type site is likely to cost from £250 for four or five pages, up to around £500 for a site with 10 to 15 pages.
Moving on from simple website designs, we come to e-commerce sites. This is where the website functions as an online shop, which may mean that your products are listed on the site, or that customers can request and pay for goods or services. The exact requirements for your website design depend on your business and how you want the site to work. For example, if you only sold one or a few products, then your site would simply need to list these products, allow people to order them and make a secure online payment to you. Since there is only a small number of different items, and online payments can be handled by a third party system, such as eBay's PayPal, this kind of site would come in at the bottom end of the price range for e-commerce sites, at around £800.
Larger e-commerce sites can be as complex as you can imagine, since online shopping is big business and the major companies are constantly developing their websites and systems. The key features for an online shop are a catalogue system to store details of your products, a shopping cart system and a maintenance or administration system. The catalogue will store details of your different products and services, including prices, postage and packing costs, and stock levels. The shopping cart system allows customers to choose multiple items to purchase while browsing your site, then 'check out' and pay for all of them. The maintenance system is the means by which you can keep the site up to date, for example by adding or removing products from the catalogue. A site like this is a lot more complicated to design and build than the most basic kind of e-commerce site and will cost in the region of £1,500. There are many possible features for e-commerce sites, so you may have to pay a lot more to get all the elements you want.
There are all sorts of other applications that can be included in a professional web site design, depending on your requirements. The most likely is a Content Management System (CMS) which allow you to maintain and edit parts of the website simply and easily. Other systems that you could have built into your website design include discussion forums, photo galleries, blogs and pretty much anything else you've seen on another website. For all of these there are many ready-made software packages that can be used for free, so the software itself won't add too much to the cost of your website design, although your website designer will have to customise the installation and design work to make it fit with the rest of the site. Adding dynamic applications to your site will add from £200 to the cost for a basic system.
There are all sorts of other applications that can be included in a professional web site design, depending on your requirements. The most likely is a Content Management System (CMS) which allow you to maintain and edit parts of the website simply and easily. Other systems that you could have built into your website design include discussion forums, photo galleries, blogs and pretty much anything else you've seen on another website. For all of these there are many ready-made software packages that can be used for free, so the software itself won't add too much to the cost of your website design, although your website designer will have to customise the installation and design work to make it fit with the rest of the site. Adding dynamic applications to your site will add from £200 to the cost for a basic system.
