I am putting together a business plan. I have a product, a logo, marketing photos, some marketing blurb already done. What should I be putting into my plan for someone to build my website? Im after a simple, clean site, safe transactional, easy to navigate: eg logo top left, pic underneath (maybe rolling diff ones), a navigation bar to the right going top to bottom, and maybe some current topic / seasonal pics underneath going bottom left to right.

Ta.

How long is a piece of string?

What are you seeking and can you use a service like Shopify rather than building something bespoke?

How long is a piece of string?

This. Anywhere from a few hundred quid if you can do most of it yourself via WordPress or the like all the way up to £10000 if you get a professional web design company to build something bespoke.

I want to sell my product from my website. The ‘front’ of the website I’ve sort of laid out above.

Behind the website, I want to be able to take payment via card or paypal and I will be posting it so it would be good to have a system to generate address labels and receipts.

Thank you both. I clearly need to do lots of research! I would like to have the autonomy of my own website.

Cheapest decent option IMO is to use magento and a template from someone like template monster and have a developer get it all working and iron out the bugs.

Magento free, template around £100 and designer around £250 to get you up and running. Paypal fairly simple to configure on there and magento will run your back end too, control stock and print invoices etc.

Very configurable as you go, and scalable. You can spend a couple of grand plus designing a very good website but with magento you can roll this out after you get going with out starting again and as you need to you can add extensions etc to improve functionality.

From your brief it could be anywhere from a few pounds to a few thousand. Or more. Or less.

*DISCLAMIER* – it’s my job, but if you want to chuck the details over, I can have a look and give you an idea of what I think you’ll need/be looking at price wise.

Email should be in my profile, but failing that you can get in touch with via:

http://www.creatomatic.co.uk

If you need a reference, we did Tally’s new Uplitt Scotland site a wee while back.

Cheers
JM

I’ve said this elsewhere on here recently, but have a look at Shopify. You almost certainly can’t afford or justify the development or on going hosting costs to get something as sophisticated, reliable and integrated with analytics and advertising platforms built bespoke.

Shopify is an option, as is WooCommerce (which we build a lot of our eCommerce sites from). Unless you’re planning to become massive – turnover and product range, then Magento is almost always huge overkill. It’s great, in the right hands but in almost every case we’ve seen its way too much (and cost as such) for what most clients need.

It all depends entirely on what it is you want the site to do, is it a single product? Is it a range, and do you want/need a shopping cart type set up? Are you selling to businesses or Joe Punter? Are you needing to work out delivery costs dependant on buyers location, size/weight etc?

A small site with A ‘product’ and a Buy Now button linked up to PayPal could almost certainly be designed and put together in a day, at a fairly low cost. But.,, there’d be little point if it wasn’t what you or your buyers needed.

How many transactions are you expecting/hoping to turn over each month – thatll determine whether PayPal is your best bet of it it’s worth looking at something like Stripe or SagePay etc.

Ultimately, it can be as big or small as you like, but a wee bit more detail and I could certainly give you a decent steer.

Agree with jamesmio.

I work as an eCommerce consultant with SMEs through to high street retailers.

Magento is great platform but it is often overkill for those with simple requirements.

Shopify, woocommerce or Squarespace are all great software as a service applications with a monthly fee. No hassles with server admin, software updates and fast to get up and running. Well worth a look.

JM and mike thank you. You may have saved me lots of cash and time.

JM – email inbound.

Take a look at Bigcartel as well. You can be up and running very quickly and is slick.
Pricing is per month depending upon how many items you’ve got on the site.

You need to shop around!

I’m having a new site built at the moment, talk about a bloody pain in the arse – I gave the designers a brief based on what it needs to have – nothing transactional but I has a quote builder / data capture feature but it’s mostly just standard stuff – an idea on art direction, some examples of other sites we wanted to steal ideas from etc.

The quote came back as £3500+VAT for design and £2500+ to encode it.

I was a bit shocked at both figures, the designers said “ah, but we do 90% of it, it’s not just pretty pictures” the encoders said “ah, we do 90% of it” spoke to another encoder we know and trust who said “a grand, maybe a bit less”

So okayed the designer and got our encoder to do it – got the first draft through from the designer and it’s awful, they’ve taken the art work we gave them from a paper design we had down, cut and paste it around the screen and sent it back – the encoder (who also designs for big co’s_) said it would have taken them 20 mins at most.

I’ve given them another week to re-visit the brief.

The quote came back as £3500+VAT for design and £2500+ to encode it.

Sounds about right – our bare minimum for a simple brochure site (no more than a simple data capture form – so no ‘quote builder’) is £5k.

Thanks to £100 website companies (spunking out template rubbish) people think that building a proper bespoke website takes a couple of days.

It does not.

The quote came back as £3500+VAT for design and £2500+ to encode it.

Sounds cheap to me, for UK.

Sounds about right, from the information we have.

Rachel

what’s an encoder?

llama – Member
what’s an encoder?

I think it’s a cheap web developer?