Typical costs involved in website design and build
I am frequently being asked by business people, ‘what are the costs involved in building me a website?’ .
So in answer to that let me give you an overview of what is involved and the typical costs. Before doing that, let me say, you may have seen on the internet various deals or packages to simplify things for people ie 1 to 5 pages GBP 497, 6 to 10 GBP 1000 etc. Those deals would have been costed on a basis of estimated costs and time expected to complete the job.
The process:
- you decide on a domain name ( your internet address ) and lease it
- allow GBP 10 per year - you get hosting ( somewhere to site your address )
- variable, depends on needs. For business hosting say GBP 120 per year - we design the structure of your website
- variable / negotiable hours * rate - we build your website on the host based on your content
- variable / negotiable hours * rate - you test the website and feed back any changes
- your time - we make the changes
- variable / negotiable hours * rate - we make the website live
The changes and testing steps maybe repeated several times. A typical hourly rate would be GBP 25 – 35. Costs would also be higher if the designer has to provide or create the content for the site. Whether it be for sourcing images or researching the niche / subject to write content that makes sense to the type of person who will be reading the site.
So from above you can see there are annual charges for domain leasing and hosting and also one off build costs which involve a number of man hours.
A typical website design process
You may be wondering what is involved with getting a business online, so below I have detailed a typical process that you would go through, as follows:
- You have an idea, product or service and decide to share it with the online community
- You contact us or another website designer
- There will be a conversation around what you want
- From that conversation we can determine whether you need a brochure site, a membership or community site, blog, shop, authority site etc and can determine whether it fits into existing software or needs something written from scratch
- We agree a price, payment plan and a timescale
- You decide on a domain name ( internet address ) and lease it, or we can do it for you
- You rent hosting ( somewhere to site your address ), or we can do it for you
- We design the structure of your website ie outline what pages, software etc are needed
- We build your website on the host, based on the content ( text, audio, video and images ) you provide
- You test the website and feedback any changes that are needed
- We make the changes and you test
- The website goes live and is visible to people on the internet
Once the site is visible on the internet it does not mean that visitors will come to it, this is where SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation ) comes into it. This is the post live work to convince the search engines that your site is the best and most relevant for their searchers.
What is an ISP and hosting?
An ISP or Internet Service Provider is a business that provides a subscriber access to the internet backbone in return for a fee. They are typically telecommunications companies and so you may buy a bundle of services including telephone and TV. In the UK the main ones are BT, Talktalk, Virgin media and Sky. So the ISP enables you to see the many servers that are out there on the internet. The servers that hold or host the content and websites.
The term hosting refers to renting space and bandwidth/usage on these servers. This is similar to your home telephone where you would have a line rental and call charges.
The owners of content or websites rent space and usage of these servers to allow other people to find and download the information, videos or audio they have on offer.
What is a domain name and why do I need one?
A domain name is an address reference on the internet which makes it easier for humans to remember and relate to, you could think of it similarly to your residential address.
Is it easier to say ‘meet you at londons O2‘ or ‘meet you at 51.5029, 0.0032‘?
So would it be easier to tell someone to ‘go to johnsblog.com‘ or ‘go to 27.223.122.250‘?
Which do you think they would remember?
So just like in the UK, the post office controls residential address generation on the internet there are registrars that control internet domain names.
With the post office, they know that your particular plot called House number, road, town,county, post code is located at a particular geographic location ( longitude * latitude ). So the mail goes to the sorting office to be sorted into geographic areas ( rounds or walks ) for redistribution.
Similarly with the internet the registrar knows that your domain name (abc.com) is located at an internet ( IP ) address reference of 27.223.122.250 which has been leased to an Internet Service Provider.
So when your computer asks the internet for something from abc.com, one of the DNS ( Domain Name System ) servers on the internet looks up the servers IP address ( location ) and tells your computer where to go get the information that it is looking for.