How Much Does A Website Cost?

Like any design job, the cost of setting up a website can vary enormously. We have put together websites for less than £100, and we have charged thousands for large sites and sophisticated programming - it all depends on what you need.

Unlike other web companies, we do not offer "standard packages", where we charge a fixed price for designing a certain number of pages, or a certain type of site. Our experience is that every customer's needs are different, and to fulfil these needs, the type and amount of work we do varies, even for quite similar sites.

So we charge in one of two ways - for our time, and for the job.

If you have a fixed budget or want to work to a particular job-rate, we need to agree in advance exactly what the site will contain, and how the source material will be provided or generated (see 'Keeping Your Costs Down' below).

The most difficult aspect of working to a job-rate is the need to stick to what was agreed. If you have a brilliant idea after the specification has been agreed and the job has started, you may have to accept that you can't just implement your new idea unless we can review the budget. Sometimes, especially on larger projects, we will make changes or add features within the original budget, but generally a fixed price means a fixed specification.

This is where our experience really counts - we see it as our job to make sure that we cover every possible good idea in advance, at the planning stage. Once the schedule and budget is agreed, it should not need to change.

Sometimes projects cannot be done on a job rate. Some customers just can't stop having new ideas and adding to the specification, and some sites require a large amount of graphic design work which is difficult to cost at its inception.

In these cases, we can work on a day-rate. This is usually set at £320 per day (£40 per hour), though it may change for different types of work, or depending on the duration of the project.

Often, the most time-consuming (and therefore expensive) part of the web design job is preparing the source material - the text and the pictures which make up the site content. Some customers have been surprised to find that we can have their website finished in less than half a day's work, if they provide us with all the source material for their site in a sensible format.

But other customers have ended up paying us £30 per hour for copy-typing from their printed catalogues or brochures. Sometimes this is inevitable, but the more material you can provide in a computerised format, the less time it takes us to prepare it for web publication, and the less you have to pay.