It is the question every business wants to know and it is the one thing you very rarely find on a web design companies website. Is pricing a website that difficult?
For large projects yes it can be for obvious reasons, but for a lot of what we do it is quite easy to provide a provisional ball park figure that should not be far from the final price. Chip Web Design has created set priced packages because from experience our most common website builds for new starters or small to medium businesses consist of either 3 or 6 core pages. We think our prices are competitive so why not let visitors know.
From my research it seems that mainly freelance designers or small design companies are happy to give pricing details, most prefer you to contact them for a price so they can pull you in and impress you with what they have to offer to justify their pricing.
Over the last 12 months I have seen more and more clients coming to Chip Web Design with bad experiences of web design companies who are searching for a company they can trust. It seems some companies are taking advantage of a customers lack of understanding and rather than wanting to build their brand on a quality value for money service they are charging extortionate prices, taking as much as they can from a customer and then moving onto the next unfortunate business.
If you are looking to create a website, I would strongly recommend doing your homework on web design businesses to find the right partner for you. Get a few quotes from big companies through to freelancers to understand what you are getting for the price. Don’t just look at designers in your area, prices vary massively across the country for the same piece of work. Then you can weigh up what is the best partner to work with for your company and be comfortable with what you are paying for the service.
Hosting prices make me gasp sometimes when I am browsing web design companies. I have seen pricing for a standard brochure website hosting range from £2.99 a month up to £400 a year! Why are these prices so massively different? Well partly because customers do not shop around, they get hooked into hosting with their web designer with the offer of the first year free or discounted and then 12 months later get slapped with a massive bill to keep their website online.
Is there any real difference in what you are getting from hosting at £50 a year compared to £400 a year? There may be some addons but essentially, NO, it is very likely that they are both running from the same server building.
Hosting charges are a yearly or monthly fee that when you strip out the actual costs of the servers and time to administrate become very tempting and very easy for web design companies to make large profits from.
For a basic hosting package that is managed by Chip Web Design we charge £50 a year, that works out to £4.10 a month, that covers our time to administer the account, the cost of the server space and we get a small profit for our services. I have never had a customer come back and require any other service that is not part of the hosting. We are not greedy, we earn our little profit like all companies have to whilst providing value to our customers. If you are confident enough to manage your own hosting you can set it all up yourself and save yourself even more with us at Chip Hosting.
If you have a website built make sure you know what the yearly running costs will be after year one. Do not think you have to host your website with the company that built your site, you can host it anywhere. Shop around, if a web design company is charging over £100 a year for hosting make sure you understand why and then compare that with other companies, you will be surprised how much you can save.
It has become more common for companies in the South of England to approach Chip Web Design for work because the difference in pricing can be huge. For large websites this can become difficult and we would always recommend a face to face meeting if it is possible but with video conferencing being easily available to everyone now it is very easy to build websites for businesses without being your local web designer.
Naturally I would say use a web designer to create a website professionally for you but a lot of companies go down the build your own website route so there is obviously an attraction for them to this. The main attraction…. PRICE!
If you know your way around websites a little, have some code experience and some image editing software you can actually make a pretty decent website from a build your own package. Even if this is you though there are still some downsides. It will take you a long time to build the site, you will quickly realise you need to understand SEO and you will find that after the first year your running costs will go up, those first year discounted costs for year one quickly disappear.
The main drawback though is that for all your hard work building your own website you cannot take it with you somewhere else because you are using a template of the build your own website company. You then end up paying £100 plus a year to keep it online so after 3 years you have put in hours of work and paid the same for a website that a professional web designer would charge for something you own and keep.
We get a lot of work requests from businesses that have gone down the build your own website who want a professional site building for them instead. If you do not have experience in building websites spend your time finding a good value professional web design company and save yourself from paying twice for a website.
IT in general is full of lots of confusing language and web designers are no different. Do not let this scare you into a decision, find a web design company that you are comfortable with, do some homework on pricing and shop around to save yourself some money. Do not get yourself tied to a web designer, make sure you own the website you have paid for and if you feel renewal costs are too high consider moving away, they may even offer you a better price to stay.
I am always happy to have a chat over the phone to help explain everything honestly and in plain English, I am not going to sell you my services, hopefully they sell themselves.