How much do web designers charge?

What is the right price to pay for a business website?

Nearly all businesses require a web presence to promote the products or services they offer. In many cases it is the only public facing media a potential customer will see. Therefore it is in nearly all cases the most important promotional element of your marketing budget, but how much will it cost?

Before you decide who to use and the price to pay, consider this list of top 10 requirements for a business website:

1. Professional design
2. Easy to navigate
3. Optimised for Google
4. Mobile device friendly
5. Editable (by the client)
6. Well written copy
7. Quality images
8. Future proof
9. Well supported
10. Low running costs

Low cost
So you might be able to secure a basic web design for a few £s per month and if you just want the web presence without support there are platforms like GoDaddy that offer such a solution.

High cost
At the other end of the web design spectrum, there are web design agencies that will charge you a minimum of a 5 figured amount and several hundred £s per year maintenance. This should cover all the above and more but is your budget going to stretch to these amounts?

Fair price
But if you shop around, ask about the service offered and look at the web designers portfolio and reviews, you can grab yourself a great deal. Like anything else inline, you need to do your research. See our web design prices.

Here’s Oast House Media’s response to the 10 key points…

1. A professional design can be created using a theme (skin) that reflects your business and your products/services. Selecting the right theme for your web pages will make a difference, ie: an image heavy web requirement may require a theme that accommodates galleries, a shop will require easy to manage product listings, a text heavy website should be clean and easy to read.

2. One click rule: make any important content available from an easy to use navigation in one click. Make categories of products/services simple to view and understand using text and relevant imagery.

3. Optimise all web pages for the UKs top search platform Google(.co.uk). Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the single most important content inclusion for your website and requires planning and the correct inclusion procedure.

4. Your web pages must be mobile device friendly, also known as ‘responsive’. In other words, whatever the screen size your web content should be easy to read and navigable (Google penalizes non-friendly web pages)

5. Once the website has been created the clients will need access to update the content so they can change images and text as the website evolves with  your business. News, Specials, Events may also need to be added by the client so as to avoid update fees from your designer. Is your web design company going to train you?

6. Legible, easy to read text is an important visual element of your web pages. Decide on the ‘reading age’ and consistently write for that visitor to your web pages. Font, colour and backgrounds also assist the potential new customers on-page experience.

7. Like text, images are part of the potential customers on-page experience, always use professional images that are clear and relevant to the subject. If using your own images mage sure they are good quality, cropped correctly and the file size has been reduced for web use, Google will penalize a slow downloading page.

8. Make sure the chosen web design platform updates as the internet evolves. By ‘internet’ we mean – security, applications, browsers, search engines etc, all evolving and changing over time.

9. When something does go wrong with a web page, ie: errors, app conflict, search engine position loss, hacks etc. You need help! Does your web design service offer a minimum of office hours support? Will you be talking to the designer who can quickly fix the issue? Are your web pages backed up every night?

10. Having paid for  your web design (or agreed a monthly fee), how much is it going to cost in the future, ie: yearly hosting, premium app fees, web name renewal, maintenance fees, edit fees etc.

To find out what Oast House Media can do for your business web design contact us today for a free consultation and proposal. We will also give you our web design solution for all the top 10 web design requirements listed above. That’s why we get top reviews for our web design services.

Oast House Media are based in Kent