design – The Web Developer Blog

How Much Should a Web Site Cost?

It is the holy grail of being a web designer, the perfect price plan, what is it? The answer is it does not really exist. You can have a website for as little as £99, although this is a one page information site, it is still bespoke and designed to suit your business it will only do so much.

What goes into a web page?

If you think about all the little boxes, areas, images, backgrounds and textual content, it all amounts to a complex layout which might take someone 30 minutes in paint (although we prefer Photoshop 🙂 ) to create. The magic is slicing, styling and profiling the page in the code.

Curved boxes, lists, placing of text are sometimes not simple three click procedures like it is in flat graphical design. In some respects the web page has dimensions, layers, and interaction. These take time… and time really is the key factor.

Most web design companies who offer the common, Bronze, Silver and Gold packages that you see with set number of pages are usually using templates, with bespoke website design pricing is done based on what the client needs, not done to a strict code and stretching or squeezing content just to fill a page quota.

Although these can serve a purpose to some extent, is it really how you want to reflect your business? That you settle for templates? It might not show you have invested time and effort into communicating to your brand to your customers.

How much work comes through my website?

Of course it depends if you are selling directly or selling a service, but you would be surprised if you have a good clean working brand driven website, it will generate revenue in time. The web is everywhere these days, you cant really escape it, information is key and if people find your business, like what you do and you give them every reason to use you, you should find things pick up nicely. It’s all about ROI (Return on Investment), think carefully about your budget but don’t tighten it too much or it could backfire.

We generally price on h0w many man hours the project takes, the more complex the greater the price. We do offer workarounds and other ideas to try to keep costs down and simplify your ideas to make things easier.

Please keep reading the BLOGS and checking back for more insight into what goes into this interesting industry and what twists and turns await us.

Why Good Design is Important!

It’s a tough world out there!

In the current climate of tough competition, your companies brand has to be at its strongest. I have realised from years in the design industry that when marketing say “brand is everything” they really do mean it.

Of course most small businesses will not have the budget to get their brand out there but on a small scale brand is still important. It helps public perception and when you have a particular style, use certain guidelines, your customers will start to feel at home.

A good brand will work from the bottom up, a customer of yours might be searching for your details through a wad of paper and when they come across your headed paper/previous invoice, you are instantly recognizable. This helps communication, improves relations and eventually leads to sales.

Public perception of brand is more important than ever, in nature we apply ourselves to groups and are judged them, even if we like it or not, and in some respects design serves a purpose to categorize your business. Are you cool? or are you….. not so cool?

Simple little things can transform your business into something with a bit more bite, a bit more leverage when it comes to winning that all important contract.

What’s in a logo?

If your logo contains fonts such as Comic Sans and other cartoony fonts, are some of your new customers going to take you less seriously? You might think it’s crazy but research has shown in the past that font type on company logos does have an impact on how people perceive your company. Take Comic Sans for example, it is a free font usually used for home poster design, as it’s not as conventional as something like Arial it’s often used for fluffy letters and other unprofessional documents. A customer seeing Comic Sans on your website or even worse on your logo might have those connotations, but perhaps they wont, after all everybody is different.

The bottom line is, try to think how your brand is communicating with your customers, is it saying what you want it to say, do you look like a low budget operation?

ADD Creative are experts in branding and brand awareness, we can look at your current brand and give you options to improve and communicate in a far more lucrative way.

Tag: design