Website design cost and recommendation

crazy_guy

I'm currently thinking about developing my business onto the web and wondering if i could get pointers on the likely cost of a professional looking website with payment capabilities along with individual customer log-in accounts.

Have you any recommendations aswell on what companies to approach in this sector.

faevilangel

crazy_guy wrote: »

I'm currently thinking about developing my business onto the web and wondering if i could get pointers on the likely cost of a professional looking website with payment capabilities along with individual customer log-in accounts.

Have you any recommendations aswell on what companies to approach in this sector.

depends which way you want this done .... custom set up will be hundreds or you could get a coder to customise a free system to your needs.,,, there are numerous free shopping carts about like magneto, oscommerce and zencart, which are easily customised (they all have in built payment such as paypal) and wouild just need a design built around it ...

to code a custom site from scratch will take 3 -8 weeks based on complexity, and will run into the hundreds to do, but as its a business site, its probably the best method ,,,

to find a coder, ask local businesses who did their site, check in the local paper (a few local companies advertise in our paper) or even get it built by getting coders to build on the project

www,getacoder.com and https://www.getafreelancer.com are 2 such tools, you post a project and people will bid on how much they will build it for you, and how long it will take, the sites have feedback so you know if they are reliable

you will need to draw up a draft of what you want, and maybe a design and what you will pay a max for the build but beware a lot of the bidders are middle eastern based and may not have a strong grasp of the english language

also try https://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk has loads of british based coders, just ask in the "looking to hire" section and people will quote you how much to build it

isofa

For a decent site, with custom design, graphics and the like, plus hosting and maintaining, then add in the complexity of shopping/accounts/baskets and you need a professional. I'd budget at least a couple of thousand. If you are clued up you can have a go yourself, but if not, don't scrimp, all your customers will see is a bad site and possibly insecure and won't bring their business to you. It's your door to the World, invest in it!

A good designer can produce a site like this alongside other projects in a month and working dedicated on it a couple of weeks. So either pay by the hour/day, or negotiate a fixed rate for the functionality.

BikerEd

You don't say what sort of business you are, or what your customers will actually do when they log onto the site so what I may be about to suggest may not be 100% suitable.

Joomla is a superb piece of free software. Onto this you can add any of thousands of free or sometimes paid-for templates to give you a different look & feel, and extensions which improve/extend the function of the site. What I really like is that a relative amateur can build a professional looking feature-rich website at a very low or even zero cost.

I only learned to use Joomla two months ago (I am long-time web developer - that isn't my profession more of a hobby) and have already converted a number of sites across to it. I have also convince a few other colleagues to do the same.

If you give us an idea of exactly what you want to do I could tell you what core parts of Joomla and what add-ons could achieve what you want to do.

bingo_bango

Agree with Ed. There are a huge amount of resources out there. There are lots of free bits you can have, and hosting is quite cheap.

You could spend anywhere from ~£40 to £4K though, as we've no idea what you need the site to do. A wee bit more detail, and you'll get a better idea of what you need.

isplumm

Hi,

What about looking at www.123-reg.co.uk ... I have used this to set up my own website .... fairly simple.

Mark

thebaldwindowfitter

http://websitesbytigger.co.uk/ can recommend this company i dont need a customer payment area but they do them .
http://hydrahosts.com/ for cheap reliable hosting

rikk_kidd

Don't know where you are based but I used ambercouch.co.uk in Cardiff for my site about a year or so ago and i can't recommend them enough. I cost about £600 but my site didn't take payments of log ins

roguetrooper74

Firstly you don't give too much details of what you need doing, number of pages, etc. Personally I wouldn't go for a cheap template. You want your site to be unique. You are competeing with millions of millions of sites and if it looks the same as 100's of others it won't stand out and will dwindle away. Ideally you need to be asking yourself, do you really need a website and how much extra revenue will it bring in. There is no point in having a site which could cost £600 upwards and only make £10 a month through it. You also need to look at monthly costs for hosting, which will vary depending on how much space you need and how much bandwidth it will use each month. I would ask my existing customers if they would shop through your site it it was available and see what they say, if the majority said no I would give up on the idea.
Also if you go ahead and pay someone to design and make a site for you, check to see if they do free content upgrades and if so how many. You tend to find if you goto a webdesign company they will have someone design the site, then someone else will code it, then someone else will work on the promoting the site and getting it to rank on the main search engines. So they are paying three people to do the job and the cost goes up. A lot of companies have prices set at per page, then things like log in accounts shopping carts ect as extras, but the prices also vary depending on if you want a bespoke site where they will design a site and won't make any others look like it or if you go for a standard template, where they only change the colour scheme to match your business colour scheme and make your banner.
So you are best to approach several companies and see what prices they offer and what they will do for that price. Another possible cheaper/free aternative is contact your local university/college and see if they have a web design course and then see if they have any students that are able to make a site how you want it as part of their work experience.