How much does a website cost?
Thanks for asking this question. As you can imagine we’re asked this question all the time.
In this article we’ll give you the answer and then unpack it for you. It’s really easy.
So here we go…
It depends.
Oh, that’s not an answer… well, yes it is.
How much does a cake cost? Or a car? Or a house?
All the factors that govern their cost are different, so we need to find out what it depends on.
For a cake it will be how big it is, what it’s made of, how complicated it was to make, how good it is and who made it.
For a car or a house it’s pretty much the same deal.
And it’s the same for a website. What does the price depend on?
Well, the answer is that it depends on a lot.
We deal with the “depends” with questions
So to work out the price we have to ask some questions.
In fact we have to ask a lot of questions.
Most web design companies get stuck at asking what a client is looking for. They stop there and jump in to offer a solution.
We can only provide a solution when there’s a really detailed understanding of what you do, how you do it and who you’re doing it for.
So to truly understand how great you are, we need to ask some questions.
The Big 5 questions
We’ll start with the easy ones. Our Big 5.
1. What does it need to do?
2. Who is your website for?
3. How do you want people to contact you?
4. Where will you point them to next?
5. Why are you doing this?
Most website briefs only cover question 1. So with the rest, we’re really getting somewhere.
That 5th question hardly gets asked at all, but we ask “Why” a lot.
Why do you want that?
Why is that important?
What else is important?
Why is that the most important?
By the end of our chat you’ll think that we are toddlers. Why, why, why?
But without the why, how can we know your business?
More importantly, how can we know your customers and what they want to know about your business – which is really what we need to know. You know?
What you think and what they think will be different. Sure, there’ll be overlap, but they will definitely be different.
More questions
Sorry if this feels like a Woody Allen film, but there’s lots of questions we need to ask.
We need to know your business so that we can know what to put online.
What makes your business unique?
How do you differ from your competition?
What is the same?
What is the main difference?
What do your customers think of you?
Why should someone trust you?
Have you won awards? If so, what for?
Where are you positioned in your industry?
Are you looking for the website to put you in a different position?
What will make someone contact you from your website?
What stops them from contacting you at the moment?
We don’t expect you to be able to answer all the questions – so we can answer them together.
Pricing isn’t just about the what. That’s easy. Just question 1.
Pricing comes down to the why, which in turn informs the what.
The what then informs the how.
And the how informs the “how much?”
So you can see that we prefer to talk, to ask these questions rather than depending on a web brief. That just deals with the what. We talk in terms of the why and that gives us understanding.
Understanding leads to value.
Value vs Price
We’re interested in achieving the best lifetime value for you. Not just quick wins, but long term gains.
A value that persists and that makes you more money.
Sometimes a lot more money.
To ensure that we’re able to do that, we need to know you can make an investment in your business. You get what you pay for and so you need to think about investing with the long term in mind.
We’ve provided value to the same clients over years – more than a decade for some.
Which comes back to our understanding the ins and outs of their business, their customers and their market.
We can only provide strategic solutions when we understand. We need to take time:
To understand you.
To understand your market.
And to understand your user.
We look for the end point, then find out what happens after the end point.
And what happens after that.
Ballpark figures
You thought that we’d forgotten to put in a price. And you’re not going to leave until you’ve got one. Talking about a ballpark figure does of course mean between one point and another – not a fixed amount.
So as you are here, and so are we, we’ll say that a WordPress website is going to cost between £5k and £50k.
Most of our sites cost between £5k and £20k.
We’ve put that in bold in case that’s all you’re looking for.
There’s always that possibility that what you need isn’t possible within that price range.
That’s not to scare you off, that’s to be realistic about the amount of work involved.
It includes a LOT of work.
So rather than just expect you to believe that, here’s a quick overview of what kind of work is included.
15 stages of every Inigo site
All our sites come with the following actions – what we do to take the site from an idea to reality. Note that these are just our actions, it doesn’t include what you need to do.
We:
1. Discover what’s needed – the why’s mentioned above
2. Specify the project based on your answers to our questions
3. Research your market for competitor analysis and key search phrases
4. Plan the user journey and storyboard the site
5. Recommend a content plan based on research
6. Visualise a concept that sums up the recommendations
7. Design all the templates – there can be 10 or more in a medium sized site
8. Build the site templates and integrate with WordPress functionality
9. Make it mobile friendly so it works across smartphones and tablets
10. Add content, which includes text and images, perhaps video too
11. Test the website with the content on multiple browsers
12. Train you to use your website
13. Prepare the site for launch
14. Launch the site
15. Measure the success of the site and recommend ongoing action
And that’s just a standard site – if you want to sell online then there’s much more to consider.
Then there’s support, software updates and potentially creating your content for you, though we prefer to do it with you.
Variation = Time = Cost
Any of these points can contain a huge amount of variation and can take between hours and days of our time.
How much time any of these takes will depend on what you need.
So, what does the variation depend on?
It depends on all the items above.
See what we’re getting at? We can’t give a price until we do the asking.
What now?
Well if you’ve got an idea for your site and want to talk about it, then let’s do that.
Talking is the first step to giving you a price. Pricing starts with that conversation.
The best way to have that conversation is to email us at [email protected] or fill in the form at the top of this page.
We’ll get in touch to start asking more questions.
But then you know that now.