I imagine that this question is a bit like asking about the length of a piece of string, but I am wondering about the cost of professional web design, and what it entails.

Basically, I run a nascent (small) educational institution, and made a servicable-enough website using moonfruit.com some time ago. The thing is, the institute has grown up a bit, and now needs something serious. I am nervous about potential costs, though, and have no idea how/where to start.

How much could I expect to pay, and what sorts of services could I expect?

Apologies if this is a stupid question.

Static site? Blog? Shop? Social media integration? Already got images or need them doing?

Got images. No shop. No blog. Would need to be updatable with things like news.

What is social media integration?

Depends on who you ask to do it. We are much more expensive than some, but massively cheaper than others. It all depends on your budget and (to a lesser extent) what you need.

Our sites generally start at around £5k for usability research, wireframing, creative design, technical build and deployment – totals around 10 days studio time.

If you want to speak directly please feel free to email me or have a look at our site – just rebuilt it and it is a bit *work in progress* but it is fully responsive so it re-orders and displays differently dependant on the device you are looking at it on.

As mastiles says, it depends very much. Some guy in his bedroom might charge you a couple of hundred quid for a simple content managed site, allowing you to create and update your own pages, with some fairly simple graphics and imagery.

A professional agency will probably charge you anything from 1k. There are pros and cons to each.

But to be perfectly honest it’s a bit of a mine field really. There are no guarantees of value or quality with either. Do a bit of research beforehand and check out any companies you approach.

If budget is a concern, I would suggest you look at something like a hosted Joomla option – it has an in built content management system (gives you a lot of control and ability to change content etc) it has a bunch of add in components that extend functionality rather than having to start again. Best of all it’s OpenSource so the code is free to use/adapt etc you would probably need some budget to make it look how you want, set it up, a bit of training and some support. I can also integrate with remote learning packages such as Moodle, CRm systems such as Sugar CRM (both of which are also OpenSource). As with MFL happy to explain what our web suppliers did for us using Joomla – am pretty impressed so far and we have a website, project management tool, blog, gallery, CRM, emarketing all built in with plans to extend over the next 12 months – nice and bite size so it doesn’t kill cashflow. Email in profile.