How much does a website cost?

That is a good question. And not one that is easy to answer.

Some companies do website packages. You pay a certain amount and you get a template website with a set number of pages. Often this is going to be a cheap price because the web company are building from a template and fitting your business into it. If you want extra pages the costs start to add up.

Here at TimMo, I don’t do packages. I don’t do templated sites. Each and every site I design and build is bespoke and tailored for your needs. No two companies are the same, and no two websites are the same.

When I speak to you about your site, I will gather some details about your business needs and expectations. I will then do you a quote based upon these details.

Generally people expect less pages than they get. You need to consider such things as contact, testimonial, blog, gallery and legal pages. Every website needs a page with the legal copy on, such as cookie policy, website terms and privacy policy. We have generic text we use for this.

Often I get potential clients coming to me and asking for a small website with one or two pages, and are surprised when I tell them they will need more. They want a home page and a contact page, and expect it for next to nothing. Then I explain that it’s not really worth building a site that small for several reasons.

Firstly the site won’t represent a business well with 2 pages. What about showing your products? About your company? A blog? A gallery? Secondly the site won’t score well in SEO rankings, because there is nothing to rank. Google looks for content and bulk as one of its criteria, and 2 pages doesn’t get a lot of meta tags or keywords on. Also WordPress uses themes to build a site. I buy a theme and use it. You can get free themes, but they are pretty crap. We use a theme called Avada and it costs us about £60 for the licence.

Plus it takes a certain amount of time for Chris at WWD to set up the site, which all has to be charged for. This cost is fixed and not dependent on site size, so the smaller the site the more expensive in real terms per page.

As part of our costs, each site includes

Features:
  • Testsite setup
  • Theme license cost
  • Design
  • Build from copy and images supplied
  • Basic SEO when the site is ready to go live
  • Responsiveness – the new site would scale to fit on most devices, such as desktop PCs, tablets and phones
  • The ability for you to make changes and edit the site yourself
As a rough estimate, an average brochure site with a homepage, about, gallery, blog, testimonials, contact and legal pages will cost around £700 to £900. This cost can be more or less depending on your own requirements. In the market we are not the cheapest, and we are not the most expensive either. You will be able to get a website built for £300, but trust me, it will be crap. Having said that, you could pay double what we charge and it could still be crap! We are confident in the quality of our work and we will not take your final payment until you are 100% happy with your site.

Hosting, Maintenance Support and Email

We will provide hosting for the site on our own private server, as it gives us total control over your site and email without having to rely on 3rd parties to intervene.
  • We will provide POP email accounts (up to 5) for use with your domain name. Total disk space for email is 1GB of data.
  • We will provide support from ourselves to your company from 9.00am to 5pm Monday to Friday.
  • We will provide maintenance to your WordPress site via the standard WordPress updates to ensure latest security patches are installed.
  • We will also provide daily backups of your website to an offsite server and assist in any restoration required.

Our hosting is through my web partner WWD. It is £20 per month, payable a year up front. It’s not cheap hosting, but comparable with other hosting plans of a similar quality offered by the likes of GoDaddy etc. I have to vouch for WWD’s hosting. My first year in business I used GoDaddy and they were very good, however a few technical issues I had lead to me being on the phone for around 5 hours to their technical support. My hourly design rate is £50 per hour. I cost myself £250 by going with cheap £5.50 per month hosting.

Had I been on the WWD hosting, I would have sent a quick email outlining the problem and Chris would have fixed it for me. Since I moved my site to WWD’s hosting 3 years ago, I have had no problems. I would recommend WWD’s hosting without hesitation.