web site "costs £120 per year to host it on the WordPress platform"

[Deleted User]

Collabora wrote: »

depends if the developer is going to do any charges/updates/maintenance on the site on a continuous basis, which paying an annual cost would imply this.

Normally a reasonable site hosting with WP would be £5 a month and a site designer would normally charge a single 1 time fee to do a site. This is roughly £150 min.

So you figure out:
1. Initial dev charge
2. Annual hosting charge (which doesn't need to be with Dev)
3. Devs annual change/update costs - with limits to how many changes are expected. Otherwise, an expectation of per-change costs on an adhoc basis

Paying an ongoing £120 annual charge sounds nice at the start; but may sound silly after 10 years

fenlander_uk

As a web hobbyist I design and operate my sites myself, but I know a lot of people who would much rather pay £10 a month not to have to worry about it.

A basic Wordpress site is reasonably easy to put up, but it will tend to look just like a basic Wordpress site, and it still needs some knowledge of how to work online. Wordpress itself is not quite as straightforward for complete beginners as people make out. For example, the sort of site you envisage will probably require a page as its homepage, rather than a blog. Does that make sense to you? It's one of the first things you will need to set up and if such distinctions are not in your area of expertise, you will have a learning curve to deal with.

A better-than-basic site needs properly designed navigation and some skill with graphics and photographs. As you are replacing an existing site, presumably you want something better than what you had previously and that is what you would be paying for.

My advice: £120 is a good investment if you get a good site and don't have to worry about maintaining it. If you're a web enthusiast and relish getting your hands dirty, that's another matter.

BTW: in this business, nothing lasts 10 years.

Collabora

ringo_24601 wrote: »

So you figure out:
1. Initial dev charge
2. Annual hosting charge (which doesn't need to be with Dev)
3. Devs annual change/update costs - with limits to how many changes are expected. Otherwise, an expectation of per-change costs on an adhoc basis

Paying an ongoing £120 annual charge sounds nice at the start; but may sound silly after 10 years

it all depends on what hosting the OP is getting. i work in the hosting business.
I have hosting plans from £30 a year all the way to £60 a month.

so the OP should find out what do they get in relation to hosting.

you will find developers will now provide hosting as part of packages as getting a VPS or dedicated server is cheap these days, so they have control the whole process rather than a few years ago when hosting was done elsewhere.

the £120 may be 80% hosting costs, so this is what the OP should be asking.

our £30 a year plan would handle a simple WP site with ease and as others state you can get some good WP themes (free or cheap)

InsideInsurance

The devil is in the detail when it comes to these things. Assuming you dont have any particularly demanding requests then a fairly normal business grade shared hosting should be adequate for your needs which typically would be ~£30 per year for pure hosting.

Different developers have different methods of charging though. Some will charge you £500 for creating the site and then £30 per year for hosting and £50/hr for any changes you want them to do including applying patches/ updates to the Wordpress engine. You however own the site and are free to move it elsewhere whenever you want (though most likely wont get a refund for a part year)

Others dont charge anything up front but instead charge a simple £X a month that covers "everything" - normally free patching of WP and possibly 1 hour of amends or such. You wont own the site straight away and may never own it depending on the terms. I know a former colleague who set up his design company this way and I think its 3 years and then the sites yours.

Obviously the second method is good as it is no up front costs but you need to be careful if there is a minimum term of staying with them. Inevitably their hope is you stay with them even after the 3 years and so they then make more money/ you lose out but it isnt intrinsically a bad model for the customer

grumpycrab

Thanks for all the advice. I should have clarified that their redevelopment (one off) cost estimate is £200. I will endeavour to verify that a. we own the site and can do content updates ourrselves b. reduce the yearly cost to cover hosting only.
Is this fair?

Collabora

grumpycrab wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice. I should have clarified that their redevelopment (one off) cost estimate is £200. I will endeavour to verify that a. we own the site and can do content updates ourrselves b. reduce the yearly cost to cover hosting only.
Is this fair?

so it looks like the £120 is for hosting as you are paying them £200 to redevelop the site.

you need to know what resources you get in the hosting plan

Space
Bandwidth
email accounts
FTP
MySQL Databases.

If they say unlimited space, then they are not telling you the truth as their is nothing such as unlimited space as a servers HDD has limited space

BJV

OP shop around. Web design just like hosting is negotiable. Where we work we have dedicated servers locked away miles away, lots of different security systems etc, with back ups just in case and it costs thousands.


But you don't need that. Even our servers are not guaranteed 100% nothing ever can be. Cloud servers seems to be the rage at the moment so might be worth a look.


Also word press ??? Ok it is very simple so even Mr Average can make something that looks good with a little playing around but I understand that you would prefer someone to do it for you. That's fine. But again shop and what ever happens make sure that you keep title of the domain.


I help with an organisation for young people and a company had charged them nearly £2000 to make a system. Basic home page then access to a blog. When it came to renewal???? I found the same template for less than £20.00 it took about four hours to make it look exactly the same. So why no perhaps get them to do this one and then next time see how you feel?


Good look and I hope that the new system who ever you go with helps you raise a lot of money and a lot of awareness.

Cortan

All depends on your experience with WordPress. This may sound reasonable, if you can't do major work on your own.