Website costs?

mick1

Hi, I am thinking of setting up my own business. I want to know how much it would cost to set up and maintain a professional looking website? I will be selling a maximum of 4 products from the website. It would need to have a facility for customers to be able to purchase products from the website

Thanks for any advice

Kurtis_Blue

From £20 a year from MrSite and Paypal to £Ks for custom build and everywhere else in between.

Kurtis_Blue

"top listing on google including adwords"

This phrase will strike fear into you once you have been on the web a few months, it is nonsense.

ek4daz

i must say when i first contacted my web designer he said it would be around £300 and then when i went in to see him it went upto £580! and i worked it back down to £400, but the way i looked at it was if i get 1 or 2 jobs from my website it will pay itself back.............

if you want to have a go at doing a website yourself someone told me about microsoft live and sure if you did a google search for it you could get more info on it

mick1

Ok, thanks for your comments everyone

krustylicious

You should be looking at £250 to £600 depending on designer/company. Anymore your being ripped off.

If your looking to use paypal or world pay ... oscommerce would probably be the best bet

qw3rt7

The set up costs are often a negligible factor to be honest.
These questions appear on MSE regularly, and get answers ranging from "I use blah blad diy @ 0.0005p per year and its great" to "under £200000 and you will have an unprofessional waste of space".

Though these answers are exaggerations, the fact of the matter is 'a website' is way too generic a phrase.
If you want to sell high end consumer electronics to a national or international market, your costs and strategies are somewhat different from someone who wants their pet shop to show up in google local results.

What do you want to sell, and to whom? Without more specifics you will get a lot of well meaning and honest, but comparatively worthless advice.

krustylicious

qw3rt7 wrote: »

The set up costs are often a negligible factor to be honest.
These questions appear on MSE regularly, and get answers ranging from "I use blah blad diy @ 0.0005p per year and its great" to "under £200000 and you will have an unprofessional waste of space".

Though these answers are exaggerations, the fact of the matter is 'a website' is way too generic a phrase.
If you want to sell high end consumer electronics to a national or international market, your costs and strategies are somewhat different from someone who wants their pet shop to show up in google local results.

What do you want to sell, and to whom? Without more specifics you will get a lot of well meaning and honest, but comparatively worthless advice.

To a degree I would agree with you on the above statement . But the price guide i gave would be for somebody starting up with no idea of the volume they expect and probably isn't going to need thounsands spent on their website.

In terms of hosting alone say going from a shared hosting package to a dedicated server you go from depending on shared package from £50 to £100 - to £500 to £2000 a year for a dedicated server. And thats not including changes to the site needed for a jump such as that.

So yes i agree with you but atm the op said 4 products, I would make the assumption untill the op says otherwise it will be a low volume site . There fore the price guide is correct.

paulwf

To give an real world example I used to pay yearly costs of around £15 for a handful of domain names, £40 for a server account with all the tools required such as email and hosting, and £25 for a content management system so I could easily update the site.

Website design is another matter. It will depend on whether you supply the logo, the images, text etc and also if you have a clear and simple vision for the style and layout of the website.

There is also the question of how much technical work you require, e.g. can you register the domains yourself, point them at the nameservers, set up the email accounts, set up error pages, do a bit of SEO etc. Most of this is all easy stuff but many people would prefer their web designer to set it up for them.

Basically yearly running costs should be well under £100. Design and implementation costs could be £50 up to thousands, it will vary enormously depending on factors such as those outlined above and the quality you require.

blue_monkey_2

You can get an e-commerce package and you'll add your own logo and manage the site yourself.

I am a real novice when it comes to stuff like this but I've designed my site myself and I am pleased with the way it looks, you can see what I have done by clicking on my user name and then choosing to look at my homepage.

I have a larger e-commerce site because of the number of products I sell but I there is a small shop option for £25 a month. There is no minimum term so If you ran that for 4-6 months you'll find out whether it is working and if not you've not lost a lot of money rather than paying out £100's to have a site designed and maintained for you. With 4 products the time to set it up will be minimal.

You can also buy other domain names and them link them to your 'main' site.

There are no other costs involved with the site I use and you can integrate it to accept Paypal by showing the logo and it goes to Paypal when people checkout.

I get mine through www.bluepark.co.uk I find it really, really easy to use and it has everything I need and the support is very good. There are forums you can go on if you need help too. HTH.

qw3rt7

@Blue_monkey: Glad you have something that works for you, out of interest, what kind of traffic are you pulling on that site? The reason i ask is i have been thinking of setting up a similar kind of service (to bluepark, not selling underwear) but am interested in hardware resource allocation.
None of the pay monthly DIY packages i have looked at offer any information about this, so i guess its not something people in the market for this kind of package care about.

As a side note, i would consider removing the 'copyright' javascript. It offeres little to no protection against copying (tools>options>content>allow javascript yes/no) but does annoy anyone with a genuine reason to right click, such as tabbed browsing.

Also hit up customer support about the checkout path. Currently having clicked 'add to basket' on any product, the potential customer is presented with the following options:
Continue shopping
Add to wishlist
Tell a friend.
What the customer probably wants to do (and definitely what you want them to do) most is pay for the product, so you need that option to be available, and the most prominent.

This is not a dig at you or a pre-sell for anything, just advice formed from my own stats and experiences.