Our process & price guide
We work with you using a consistent and proven process that helps deliver a successful project. The steps highlighted below will help you understand where the value in our service comes from and explain how our pricing is derived.
Our Process
1. Introduction Call
Our initial scheduled call will last around 30 minutes. This will help us understand a bit more about what you are looking to achieve.
2. Project Estimate
From our initial call, we should be able to estimate roughly how much budget will be needed to deliver a successful project.
3. Project Discovery
This is a series of interviews and surveys that drill down into the detail of the requirements. We establish the site architecture, the pages required and any unique functionality needs.
4. Proposal
Here we present our formal proposal and scope of work based upon everything we established in the Project Discovery phase.
5. Project Startup
Once we have your signed off we can lock in your project into our schedule and begin the preparation stages.
6. Design & Development
Here we work through a UX/UI design and after gaining your approval, we will build the site into the browser.
7. Testing & QA
We now test everything on the development version of your site and ensure everything works as we want it.
8. Delivery & Launch
Our final stage is to get your website live and out to the world. We let Google know so that your new site can be found.
WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT PRICING
How we price a project
A common question we get asked is, “How much will a new website cost me?”
Our answer is always “That depends on what you need, the overall scope, how complex the project is going to be, your deadlines and other specifics”.
Your website is your central digital marketing hub, so it should be invested in properly. Cheap websites are always available, but also usually return disappointing results for a business.
Although we treat every situation as a project with clearly defined outcomes, there are many moving parts and processes we work through that ensure we deliver the correct website for your situation.
From years of experience, there are no “one size fits all” solutions. However, as an indication of our pricing, custom website design & development projects start at £3,500+VAT and in 2023, our average project price was £5,200+VAT.
Our ongoing website management services are provided once a project is delivered and start at £50+VAT per month.
Price guide
A typical small but effective website for a business: From £3,500
Appropriately done using the processes highlighted above, this would be a smaller website with between 3 and 6 pages or sections designed to showcase your business, products or services. Typically your site would have a Home, About, Services, Portfolio, Testimonials and Contact page.
Power up your website functionality: From £4,500
With a larger website requirement of between 7 and 20 pages or sections, there could be some additional complexity required. We may have to deal with powerful additional functions like appointment booking widgets, secure online payments, live chatbots, email marketing integration, extensive content, blogs & articles or even some limited e-commerce.
Something special: From £8,500
Highly bespoke or highly complex websites with non-standard integration or deep database-driven content for example a membership or directory website would attract a higher fee due to the development and configuration time required to accomplish the results required.
Additional specialist services
Suppose your new website is to be the central digital hub of your online marketing, generate leads, create engagement or sell products & services and is not just a pretty “brochure site”. In that case, you should present your visitors with the most persuasive written content and high-quality imagery.
The indicative budgets shown above would exclude the hire of a professional copywriter – as a guide, professional copywriting would be charged per word (typically around 50p per word). A page on a business website typically has anywhere from 500 to 5000 words of written content that persuades the visitor to take a specific action.
The budgets shown above would also exclude the hire of a professional photographer to capture best your products, services, team members or examples of work.
We can bring those professional services into the project from our network of contacts that we work with regularly.
This is like you asking for a basic holiday, but not even telling us where you’d like to go. It’s almost impossible to price a request like this without a conversation.
This would still depend on how many pages or sections of a page you’d need to be designed, built, configured and integrated with your other systems.
In terms of time required for discovery and consultation, design with revisions, stock, imagery selection and approval, build and test, prepare for launch, DNS management, SEO readiness and finally site launch onto the internet, we can’t honestly provide the quality of service needed for less than £3,500 +VAT.
If your budget is less than this, then we are probably not a good fit for your requirements.
Your written content is the most important part of your website and should not be skimmed over.
It’s you talking to your website visitor, so it has to be engaging and show that you can solve the problem they are looking for a solution to. That text should also be your “tone of voice” and be written in a way that your ideal client or customer understands and likes.
For those reasons, we can offer the services of a professional copywriter. Many clients do choose this option, but it does come at an extra cost beyond the technical development of your website, so be prepared to spend a little more to have this critical stage completed.
You can of course hire your own copywriter and pass their information into us, or you can write your own if you feel confident that you can do this.
The quality of the images used on a website can be a deal breaker.
No one wants to see pixelated, low resolution images that don’t show of your products & services to the best of your ability.
All too often we receive photographs of project work, products or locations which have been taken quickly on a mobile phone without much thought about how they might appear later on a website.
Mobile phone these days do have extremely good, very high resolution cameras built into them, so you can, with some forward planning, good lighting and proper framing, produce images suitable for your new website.
But where you can gain an advantage over your competitor’s website is by engaging with a professional photographer who will always produce the best images for you. That small extra investment could be the difference in your website visitor choosing your service rather than your nearest rival.
Where your budget doesn’t stretch to using a professional, we can work with your own images to a degree, will still likely need to retouch them, frame them and optimise them for website use.
We can also purchase licensed stock images on your behalf where the budget allows.
What is the landing page for?
Is it to generate leads, generate enquiries, sell a product or perhaps even recruit talent?
What is to happen when someone lands on the page?
Is the landing page to be integrated with any other platforms?
As you can see, the discovery phase is still the very first point of planning and from there the time, skills and efforts can be calculated and priced correctly for you. Book a call and let’s chat this through.
Yes, you can! We understand that not everyone values what their website will do for them.
If your budget is very tight, there are a number of places like Fiverr, Upwork or People Per Hour where you can advertise your requirement and work through the responses you get (which will take some time).
If you hire from these platforms, then you might be able to achieve what you are after on a limited budget, but be prepared for communication challenges, language barriers and lots of folks “selling” you hard but not really delivering the results you hoped for.
In the end, it’ll still become a project which you will need to manage fully yourself in your own time.
Yes, you can! You can use WordPress yourself if you have the skills needed, or you can use platforms like Weebly, Wix and Squarespace.
These platforms are very handy in getting you started with a website where budgets are very tight.
However, remember that you are effectively renting your website and not owning it. If a platform makes a change or sells up (Mr Site is a recent example), then you will need to adapt quickly to those platform changes.
Google’s search engine is a “research tool” for those looking for answers to their problems.
If your site offers the answers, then it might do well. But just publishing a website is not enough to hit the top of the search engine.
Your site needs to search friendly and comply with the search engine’s best practice guide.
Critically, Google refers users of their search engine only if that searcher is going to enjoy a good experience. Your site needs to “EAT” for Google and that means it should offer Expertise, have recognised Authority and be Trustworthy before Google “promotes” the site in their search engine results pages.
If search engine results are important to you, this would be something we’d build into a project and would cover this at the initial discovery phase.
Rest assured that we can provide the three critical pathways needed to achieve the search engine results you crave:
- On-Page Optimisation
- Keyword research and content creation
- Quality backlinking to your site
Once we launch your new website, we will host it and take care of it proactively through one of our Proactive Care Plans.
If you need help promoting your website, then that phase could include additional work and costs which we would provide once we have run a comprehensive discovery of what your website needs to do.
If that’s your preference, then yes this is possible.
After our initial discovery phase, we can address this and if you’d rather be coached in how to build your website where you carry out the actual build process with one to one personal coaching from us, then we will price that work accordingly.
Fair warning: one on one coaching does tend to end up much, much more expensive than having the project completed for you and you need to be committed to spending the time required for the teaching sessions to take part as well as the actual build time. Our hourly rate for coaching is £75+VAT.
