Isn’t this a strange topic for a blog entry on a web design firm’s website? Well, we’re not trying to scare you off: at Edinburgh Web Designs, we’ve scoured most of the Scottish (and UK) competition and we know we’re offering good value prices for the quality of website design we offer.
However, it’s still common for would-be customers to balk at the price of a website. Perhaps we have quoted them £695 for a small business website, or perhaps £1,295 for a larger online presence with some special functionality. “I didn’t realise websites cost so much!” they will say - or you can hear them saying to themselves.
From our experience, it seems that a part of the problem is a widespread misperception that web design work is somehow “easy” or the mentality that the internet is still not something to be taken absolutely seriously as a sales medium. “Hey it’s the internet - it’s all happy-clappy and free, man!”.
Along the same lines, people often seem to think making a website must be a bit like editing a Microsoft Word document - where you can drag and drop images and text into place and style them with a toolbar. Then you can put the document on the web and, well, that’s it. To a limited extent, for a very basic web presence there’s some truth in that.
But for a modern, professionally designed website - that’s a hundred miles from the real picture! The modern web page is a sophisticated technical document.
As with any skill, talent, profession or undertaking, you don’t really know the sheer amount of work and knowledge behind doing it until you try it for yourself. And, in the words of a non-web designer friend of ours who recently tried to create her own website, it takes “absolutely ages” to do even the most basic things - and that’s when you’re not achieving professional results!
To create a modern website, each page needs to be “programmed”. Items like text, links and images are individually and manually placed, using fiddly little bits of code. Every aspect of the layout of the page has to have thought put into how it is going to be done. It is an immensely fiddly and time-consuming process.
Then there’s the expensive, energy-intensive process of tasking a designer to innovate a gorgeous graphical design in the first place. And this is before we even get into any special features of a site like shopping carts, blogs, galleries or forums.
For example, to create a small business website:
- We need to find out what you want, what your tastes and preferences are. There will often be a great deal of non-chargeable correspondence before we even begin work on a project.
- A designer has to be tasked to create initial graphic concepts - around 2-3 days of designer time.
- There will then be a number of revision rounds to get the design just right - potentially several more days.
- The design then needs to be intricately chopped up and formed into a complicated combination of web code and graphics, to make a usable template for use throughout the site. Careful thought needs to be put into the best way to achieve each part of the site. This takes anywhere between 1-3 days of web developer time.
- This template is used to make the pages of the website, each of which needs to be filled with content and images. There may be specific images to make for certain pages, certain layouts or functionalities for some pages. Again, time here is days and weeks.
- All kinds of minutiae then have to be performed and checked - Is the web code valid? What about the Sitemap for Google? Are all the required little icons and links and copyright notices in place? What changes does the client need? Has making these changes broken another part of the site? Does it display correctly on all browsers? If not, how are we going to fix that? This “cleaning up” and quality assurance process itself can absorb a few days.
A website will actually have been re-uploaded and tested several hundred times before it goes live.
It can easily take over 100 hours of hard work to make even a small business site. When you start looking at it like that, it becomes clear that the only way that professionals manage to make this complex, involved and challenging process profitable at all is through having the sheer proficiency to do these difficult things quickly.
As a customer, you need to consider the price of your website in the context of your business. How many leads will your website have to provide to pay for itself? If a single successful lead from your website will earn hundreds of pounds, then are you apportioning appropriate value to the worth of your website? Some clients figure this out for themselves with experience. Many stay stuck behind the glass ceiling of not wanting to spend the money to get the results.
This is particularly important if you are operating in a competitive niche. Comparatively speaking, the web is still in it’s infancy, but businesses are now becoming particularly savvy and there is extraordinary competition in some markets, particularly of course in property, holiday accommodation, some types of entertainment and in eating out. Every now and again we are amazed when someone wants us to get them to the top of Google in such a niche and thinks they’re only going to need a few hundred pounds to do it. Think realistically about how much a top Google rank in your niche is worth - a site generating tens of relevant enquiries every day - £5000? £10,000? More? Many top sites will have spent at least that to get there.
Indeed, our most successful clients appreciate the value of their website as essentially their primary “store front” and have a willingness to spend money to get the results they want.
If you don’t have a business yet, or you’re not making enough money to cover the costs of a website, you should ask yourself if a website is your first priority now. Perhaps you would be better getting a copy of the excellent free NVu (a web authoring program) and waiting until you have proven you have a real business. In general, a website does not a business make. We don’t want to make you a website if your business is just going to fail - it’s not good for our portfolio!
If the time is right for you to build a website, you can make an excellent start by ordering up a beautifully designed site from Edinburgh Web Designs, programmed to the latest industry standards. We have a range of competitively priced packages between £595 and £1,995 to give you a head start in your area of business. But if you’re tempted to think web design prices are expensive, think about all the the skilled work that’s going into your website, and what you want your website to do for your business!
Mike