Ideally a small one who I can actually talk to, not some big company. I just need 2-3 pages doing fairly quickly. Ideally based in Devon, and reasonably priced… Anyone know anyone, or is this a moon on a stick question?

Cheers

Joe

Don't assume that because you want just 2-3 pages it'll be any cheaper.

Most companies will be building on some kind of content management system (even if they don't actually give you access to it) so page count very rarely has any direct affect on price.

Cost will be driven by the design, and the initial cutup into HTML (web page code to normal folk)

Price then gets driven up depending on how bespoke and in depth the design gets on a per page basis and the subsequent extra development time.

But basically, a simple 1 page site won't really be any cheaper then a simple 2, 3 or 10 page.

You'll find someone who'll do it for £500 – it will be ropey though. From £2k – £3k for someone small but good.

Thank you GaryLake – someone who understands the business – are you in it yourself?

We recently had someone in wanting an eCommerce site that would dovetail with his Sage accounting system – design, build, hosting etc.

He had £1k.

We suggested an Ebay shop.

But if you have a sensible budget, we are small (four of us) and always at the end of the phone. Based in Yorkshire, but work with clients further afield than you (Morzine x6, Slovakia, New York)…

Cheers guys, thanks for the info. Yeah, I may have to up the budget..

Blue Top Package from Full Cream Milk for less than £500

http://www.fullcreammilk.co.uk/delivering/your/bluetop/

Highly recommended

At the end of the day, dependant on what you need the site to do, you will be able to get something simple done for £200 or so dead easy – there are lots of people doing that sort of work.

But if you have a serious commercial proposition you should consider the budget you have. If it is simply a personal site, you could look at a WordPress site which cost nothing.

To give you an idea of our costs, we would charge a full day for a holding page design (ie one single page and non-interactive), build and put live – £480.00

Something like that above from Geoff is fine if you are happy with an off the shelf product and it looks good value for what it is. But there is only a choice of three set designs so there could be hundreds of other people out there with very similar looking sites.

I just need 2-3 pages doing fairly quickly. Ideally based in Devon, and reasonably priced..

Just trying to satisfy the brief. 2 out of 3 aint bad 😉

By the way, I have nowt whatsoever to do with Full Cream Milk, other than I went to school with the main man 20 years ago!

EvilJoe. Annson and Associates did mine, just what I asked for and a good price.

I agree Geoff – it seems a decent enough proposition if it is all you need. Unfortunately for people like me, potential clients see things like that and assume all web design costs £500 and get a shock when we quote £5,000…

Unfortunately for people like me, potential clients see things like that and assume all web design costs £500 and get a shock when we quote £5,000

Tell me about it – 7 figures and rising! http://data.nbn.org.uk/

Sounds quite a lot, but obviously I have no idea what back-end is built into that (database, CMS etc). But that is certainly more like the sort of work we usually find ourselves undertaking.

Yup, I agree, it's totally horses for courses- what full cream milk offer seems to be about what I need and at the right kind of price, may have to investigate word press further, if I have the time/patience.

And it all depends upon what you want your web site to do just pages or fully interactive with the customre. There is usually an on-going cost as well.

BTW you don't want to know what this multi-national that I'm corporately slaved to charges for a new web site…

I own this company Fantastic Thinking

We've made a few websites 😉

You might not need to up the budget, depends what you want, write a brief post it on here, see what happens.

To write your brief think about the following things, you need to tell a potential web agency what you business does, we don't need great amounts of detail at this stage but as a minimum a 2 paragrapgh description will help beyond measure. Will the bushiness trade online or are you trying to attract customers offline. ie Is the website purely a shop window.

Think about this carefully..

State your Unique selling points?

What’s your customer acquisition strategy? Who are your customers?

How are your customers going to find your website? Just because you have a website doesn't mean anybody will visit it.

What is the main objective of the site? & how will you measure its success?

Set a budget but be realistic about what you want to achieve..

It's hard to give analogies in this business but I'll give it a go, for example if you wanted to drive 30 miles you can pay 250k for an Aston martin, in fact you can pay 100k for an Aston Martin or you can pay 20k for Mondeo or £250 for a perfectly good Fiesta they all will drive 30 miles. They are all cars but take your Fiesta to a racing track and see how it gets on against the Aston. Online though sometimes you can beat the big boys (look at Alpkit website vs Karrimor) the playing field is much leveller.

Also set a budget for marketing your site (usually much bigger than the build cost)

Set a yearly budget to maintain (both internal time) and external costs (hosting maint)

With half a brief most agencies will give you enough time to put you on the right tracks.

But saying I want a 5 page website won’t cut it.

Just had three pints so if any of that doesn't make sense ignore

Thank you GaryLake – someone who understands the business – are you in it yourself?

We recently had someone in wanting an eCommerce site that would dovetail with his Sage accounting system – design, build, hosting etc.

He had £1k.

We suggested an Ebay shop.

But if you have a sensible budget, we are small (four of us) and always at the end of the phone. Based in Yorkshire, but work with clients further afield than you (Morzine x6, Slovakia, New York)…

Yeah, I'm 10 years into my career in digital and am currently senior designer for a boutique agency in Bristol.

I do friends websites for a hobby and bike money. I get free templates (open source) and then heavily edit them as I am not good at ground up design but understand HTML, PHP, ASP, cgi etc a fair bit. Its my art skills that are lacking. Anyway I do change them quote a lot but always advertise the original design. There are some very bad website designers out there that yes just take stock templates and don't even mod them and charge quote a lot of money for them or just take ages to make a very bad bespoke website (my mate actualy experienced this).

I make no excuses that I am an amateur and I suggest a price after discussing what they want and modify the site to their spec if/when required. I also update it for that price as well. I usualy charge £500 in total and usually they are 5-8 pages often with a bit of server side coding etc and logo design as well.

Edit: HI Gary – I'll send you my pic from the FOD Sunday 🙂

I am based in Devon but I think my wife might be peed off me doing to many websites 😉

Foxy: assumed you were Surrey/Sussex way – we should probably catch up for a ride at some point! Exmoor would be a good halfway – not that I know any routes there mind.

just a thought have a look at yola.com and do it yourself

I have been told it is not hard, alledgally 😕 ( but I do keep loosing the V on my keyboard)

Foxy, we may be able to arrange a bombers for urls exchange programme…. just don't tell the missus (tell her you're riding or something…)

eviljoe YGM 🙂

Gary YGM 🙂