Website Considerations

We offer a website building service guaranteed to provide you with a beautiful, eye-catching and effective site that is optimised for search engines and social media, which will look great on mobile devices and which will give your business a memorable online presence. However the process can be a little like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where the picture you’re building is comprised of your own desires and needs, so before it can begin it’s very important for you to consider the following questions carefully:

1) Why Do You Want A Website?

Before you start it’s necessary to have a clear idea in your head about why you want to have a website for your business. Do you want it simply as an online business card or brochure setting out what you have to offer; do you want it to be a point of contact between yourself and your customers (or potential customers); or do you actively want to sell your products and services online?

Maybe there’s another reason, but whatever it is make sure you understand the motivation behind your desire to have a website for your business, otherwise you may start out in an unfocused frame of mind (which is never a good way to begin anything).

2) What Do You Want Your Website To Do?

As a follow-on from the question above it’s important that you know from the beginnng what you want the function of your website to be. Some of the possibilities are shown below:

• Highlighting your expertise or your creativity, explaining the services you offer and how they can help your customers
• Selling your products and services using an e-commerce system
• Showcasing your products with an image gallery
• Surveying your customers to find out more about their needs and desires or collecting basic pre-sales information
• Providing people with good quality after-sales onformation that they can look at before they buy (such as manuals, instructions, return policies and general advice)
• Providing online quotations or estimates or taking bookings
• Starting a membership site with a password-restricted area
• Getting people to sign up to your newsletter or to your email list
• Offering a diary of events where people can meet you at shows or exhibitions

These are just a selection of some of the possble objectives that you may have for your website, but it’s important above all to be clear about what you want the site to do. Set your short-term, medium-term and long-term targets if you can so that your designer has as detailed a brief as possible before the construction process begins.

3) How Do You Want Your Website To Look?

In many cases people are happy to leave a lot of the visual look of a site down to the designer, but this isn’t always the case so it can be of enormous help if you do have some idea before you start about how you might want to present yourself and your business to your visitors. Nothing can be more frustrating both to you and to the designer than a number of false starts due to an incomplete (or even non-existent) vision, or one in which your mind keeps changing again and again. In particular you should think about:

• having a clear structure and idea of how the site will be put together. What will be the different sections and what information do you want to be included in each section?

• having the text for each section and/or page clearly laid out in your mind even if it might change later on, as this will give your designer a better means of picturing the whole structure while creating design ideas.

• having any pictures you might want to use ready in a digital format (if possible). These need not necessarily be the final images but should at least be preliminary versions to indicate what would go on each page.

• any colours or colour schemes that you would prefer, maybe based on your own branding if you own a business.

Also think about the sites on the web that you like and don’t like. Make notes of the website addresses and why you have those feelings.

Only when you’ve considered the points above can the final question be asked, which is:

How Much Will The Website Cost To Build?

As you may guess this can be very difficult to answer because it’s like going into a motor showroom and asking how much a car will cost to buy. In much the same way as the dealer would require further information about the sort of car you require for your needs (such as the size of the vehicle; how many doors it will have; whether you want a saloon or hatchback; the capacity of the engine and its fuel consumption etc) the cost of a website will generally depend on what you want your website for and what you want it to do.

This is why we’ve asked you to pay careful consideration to the three questions above, because what can help to make a website cheaper is to have a clear idea before you start of why you need a website, what you want your site to do both now and in the future, and how you would ideally like it to look.

When we meet with you we will take the answers you provide to these questions together with a consideration of your potential audience, and only then would any design work be done. However, as a general guide, the price for a standard website for a small business (on which you would be able to add and remove text and images yourself without having to go through us anytime you wanted to change something) would be around £500. It may be a little less or a little more depending upon your requirements – but bear in mind that this price would also include the hosting of your site on our servers for one year, so if you wanted to arrange your own hosting the cost would of course be lower.