If you have ever asked different web design agencies to provide quotes for a new website you probably found that prices varied wildly, even though you gave them all exactly the same brief. The more expensive agencies aren’t necessarily going to provide a better service and the really cheap ones may be cheap for good reason.

Are the expensive ones ripping you off? Are the cheap ones cutting corners? Exactly what is a fair price for a website?

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The Cost of Building a Website

First let’s have a reality check. The aim of any business is to make a profit, otherwise it isn’t a viable business. In order to make a profit they must sell their goods or services for more than it costs to deliver them. Before an agency makes any profit on a web design project it has to cover all it’s business costs.

Every hour a member of their team works on your website is costing them money. Many different skills are required to build a website:

• Project Manager
• Creative Designer
• HTML/CSS/Flash Programmer
• Web Developer
• Copywriter
• Search Engine Optimiser

People with these skills can demand salaries of anywhere between £18,000 to £50,000 year (and a lot more) depending on their seniority, skill level and area of expertise. That means it is costing the agency anywhere between £10.00 and £50.00 per hour to build your site. Let’s be conservative and work with a rate of £25.00 per hour to keep things simple.

So how long does a site take to build?

Well it depends on what you want. A simple 5 page website is going to take a fraction of the time it takes to build a content managed ecommerce website with lots of fancy features. It also depends on whether you use an off-the-shelf template (that thousands of other people are probably using already) or if you have one designed for you. We will assume you are having a custom designed 5 page website without any special features i.e. just graphics, text and HTML and we will assume you are going to provide all the photographs and text content.

A creative designer may take anywhere from half a day to 3 days or more to produce the concepts for a new website. Let’s say it doesn’t demand a really high-end design so we’ll just spend 1.5 days on it. That will cost us £300.00.

Assuming you approve our lovely designs without the need for any further tweaks (which rarely happens) we can pass them onto our HTML/CSS coder to convert them ito functional website templates. A good coder could probably wrap this up in a day, which costs us roughly £200.00.

Next we take your photos and text and populate the website with your content. It is mostly a copy, paste and tidy up job so it should only take a few hours. Let’s call it half a day at £100.00.

So there we have it. Your website is finished and it only cost our agency £600 to build! Hoorah!! But hang on just a moment….

There is More to Building a Website than Just Building a Website

The website has not been audited, spell checked or optimised for search engines. We haven’t taken into account the cost to the agency of going after and winning the project in the first place, any of the time required for travel, meetings or project management. We haven’t included the other business expenses that have to be covered such as:

• Advertising & Marketing
• Rent & Rates on Business Premises
• Utilities (gas, electricity, water, phones, broadband)
• Computer Hardware & Software
• Business Insurance
• Accountancy & Legal Fees
• .. and probably more!

And this is before we even start talking about making a profit!

In general an agency will need to markup the hourly rate they pay their staff by about 50% just to cover costs. Of course the aim of the game is to make a profit so they will need to mark this up by another 20% or so. This means your very basic website, built by a relatively junior web designer (costing our agency £600 in wages) is actually going to cost you the customer £1,080.

And nobody here is being paid extortionate salaries or creaming off a huge profit!

What if You Want a ‘Proper’ Website?

Of course you might want to enhance your website with things like:

• Professionally written sales copy
• Optimisation for best performance in search engines
• An online shop
• A content management system
• A blog
• Custom features…. the possibilities are endless.

This is all going to add to the cost. In very general terms if you want a professionally designed website, with effective sales copy, that is optimised for search engines, with a content management and/or ecommerce system, you need to be setting aside a budget of at least £4,000 (and I know a lot of agency staff reading this will be thinking “Blimey! We don’t get out of bed for less than £4,000″).

Budget Websites

Of course you can get this kind of thing done on the cheap. You will probably find people offering fully-featured websites for a few hundred pounds. So how can they afford to do this and still make a profit?

Here are some common tactics:

1. Using low-paid, low-skilled staff.
2. Outsourcing to freelancers.
3. Outsourcing to India or the Eastern Bloc.
4. Using off-the-shelf, ready-made templates (that have usually been used by thousands of other websites).
5. Re-using previous designs and just changing the colours.
6. And, dare I say it, over-promising on what they are going to deliver.

I’m not saying everyone who offers a very attractive deal for little money is doing anything wrong. You just need to know what you are getting into. Be aware of the fact that building even a simple website from scratch costs a fair amount of money and if it is really cheap it is probably for a very good reason.

The cheapest isn’t necessarily the best value and the most expensive isn’t necessarily the best service, but hopefully somewhere in the middle you will find someone who is just right. In general the bigger the agency, the bigger their overheads and the more they are going to charge per hour.

Ask lots of questions, be very specific about what results you are expecting and get as many competitive quotes as you can.

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Tags: Web Design, web site quote, website cost, website price