Would anyone care to give me a ballpark figure for what a website costs that a) doesn't look pap and b) has e-commerce functionality?

We'd be talking a single product site, including product photography.

My other half worked for a company that would do simple static sites for £80 (based on a template of your choice) if you sent the text and the pictures. Consider a pro photog and a proper custom site design to be in the order of low thousands.

I don't know the answer but one thing to consider is how are you planning on taking payments i.e. do you need some form of secure server to collect CC information which I assume will increase the costs/have a subscription attached?

Between five and ten times the price of a logo.

There – that should get the debate going. 🙂

I'm not the usual STW bod and can see that something that costs £80 is going to a) be pain in the arse to update and b) have had a total of half an hour spent on them.

Maybe something on a par with the http://sugru.com/ website, which isn't incredibly designed looking but has a half decent look & feel to it.

I used this lot a while back – http://www.blueicewebdesign.co.uk/ and they did a good job.

I reckon you could find someone to do a very basic site with paypal payments for under £300. It would probably look pretty basic, but function fine.

Then add money depending on how classy you want things.
I built my own site for http://www.shinycufflinks.co.uk as I had some previous experience in web. It's not great but looks more professional than the original one page paypal affair. Allows me to keep track of my stock and do special offers etc. Still uses paypal.

All you then need is a friend who is keen on photography to do some decent shots for you. I took all my own pictures for my site.

If I was to charge for something similar – including photos I would probably want 1K for it. I am expensive though…. It is probably between 40 and 60 hours of work spread over 2 to 3 weeks.

And all the logos and graphics. It's a new venture that may or may not go ahead, so I just want a rough idea…

£50 seems to be a nice ballpark figure that Graphic Designers quote.

It's as long as a piece of string tron, really it is. Depends on who you ask and how much you think their work is worth. The sugru site is pretty plain and simple and easy to achieve with standard free templates, adding paypal payments isn't hard – I can see you doing it yourself for the price of a pro photog taking the images for you. Or I could charge myself out at £85 an hour and take a week to do it for you. You could get a student to build it for a reasonable cost – when going thru uni I built a 5000 item shopping cart site for an online site, took a month at £5 an hour over summer hols, plus mates-rates on bike parts.

Ta very much for the answer. Web would be a primary means of marketing & sales so low Ks seems like the right answer.

You could use something like opencart to do it these days, it's free and just requires hosting and photographs for products, and maybe a bit of graphic work on the buttons/colour choices etc to make it more individual.
http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/details.php?scriptid=93&name=OpenCart#

As soon as you get into building e-commerce functionality that actually works and is secure, then you're talking thousands not hundreds.

And I would spend some decent money on design too. Looking at craply designed websites is one thing. Putting your credit card details into one that looks like its been knocked together is another thing entirely

Depends on what you want but we usually charge between £150-500k

Apologies that was a stupid answer and no use to man nor beast.

If you intend to use a website as your primary source of marketing and if you want e-commerce functionality then I would suggest you invest your money into the design rather than the build.

You need to find a good web designer, plenty exist but a specific web designer with decent CSS knowledge.

Budget £2k to come up with design and customise the following applications.

Look at the following good commercial applications:
http://www.shopify.com I’d use this as your e-commerce base application
http://www.campaignmonitor.com Use this for your list management and email

The 2 have a mutual plug-in so that they work together.

If you do that then you will have a top quality application, nicely designed and won’t have spent the earth.

Avoid bespoke & avoid open source

logos cost fifty quid. says right here: http://www.blueicewebdesign.co.uk/logo-design.html

pay any more and you're a mug.

😉

Photium are pretty good for an off-the-shelf solution. Especially good for folk like me who need their hands held at every turn of the internet maze.

The templates are all fully customisable and don't look rubbish. Importantly, the service is literally second to none. Questions are usually answered in minutes rather than hours.

Payment is through paypal but as mentioned above, it would be easy to link to another site to take payment…

Have a look at mine if you like – link in my profile (or just click my user name).

@fettling – £1k eh? Sounds like Interesource bargain-basement prices to me… 🙂

Ahh fudge, suprised to find you lurking on here…. want any cufflinks?

I do the occasional stint of lurking…!
Might be interested if the price is right… 🙂