How much does a website design cost?

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How much does a website design really cost?

While researching your trades website design, you’ll probably be inundated with freelance website designers and agencies all offering you a website, and at varying prices. Who to pick? How much is too much? Do they understand your business or sector to offer you the best solution? Afterall, a website is an extension of your business.

There is much more to a website than just the way it looks – although it appears, the visuals are not always considered. As with most industries, you get what you pay for, and these words could not be truer within trades website design. Let’s take a look at the various options when asking how much does a website design cost.

What are the different types of website designs?

A quick search displays over a million results when you’re researching website design options. Let’s break it down into a couple of categories to clearly outline which option might be best for your business and budget.

1. DIY Website Design

Website builders provide a one stop shop for getting online quickly, with a monthly fee covering the domain, hosting and website. These have a lower start up cost and are ready to go out of the box.

However, website builders are very limited with design layouts that look obviously “handmade”. Your business may quickly outgrow the image your website displays, and soon enough you’ll want a professional to fix your trades website design. Heck, how often have you turned up to a job and the customer has had a go first? Usually costs them more in the long run right? Well, the same applies here. Have you ever bought a Titan or other own-brand drill, good for putting Ikea furniture together, but lacks any real punch – and you wouldn’t be seen with it on a building site.

2. Custom Built Websites

These websites will effectively support SMEs (small and medium enterprises) which require a professionally designed website to display their services and company information. Usually built on a CMS like WordPress by a small agency or freelancer, with coding or design experience. Similar to your higher end branded tools, like Milwaukee or Makita – function very well, look good and will stand the test of time while not requiring a re-mortgage to fund the project. 

Typically custom built websites are designed around UI/UX, include on-page SEO and are built with your ideal customer in mind. Spending the extra cash on a custom built website here will give your website a much better chance of doing the job it needs to do, generating customers.

3. Agency Developed Website

All singing and dancing websites, most likely built by a team of developers and designers incorporating large amounts of code to build a super-duper website. These websites are suited to high-performing businesses with a large budget looking to really maximise their online presence. Think, sitting in your air-conditioned office, while your team is on-site using that Milwaukee.

Developer websites will usually interact with visitors and automatically collate click information to further develop your website for the best user experience. This will usually involve an agency with multiple teams of developers, designers, marketers and SEO gurus.

What Are Web design basics?

To get an idea of how much a website actually costs, we need to understand the basics of web design. If your website visitors are not converting or enquiring into your services, it’s as useful as a bottomless paint pot.

Design – A website which showcases your business and its services is important when developing your trades website design. Imagery, copy, headings and navigation can easily influence the way your customers interact with your site. Step into their shoes, rid yourself of any trade knowledge and think about what you’d want to know from your service. 

User experience (UX) – UX generally looks at the overall experience your visitors have with your service, understanding the usability, navigation and design. It’s a behind the scenes look to understand your visitors’ habits and interests to capture their attention.

User Interface (UI) – UI focuses on the visual elements of a website, graphics, typography, colour palette and images. Anything that makes the website design visually appealing to entice your audience to keep on scrollin’ scrollin’ scrollin’!

Performance – Your website only has a few seconds to keep your audience engaged, literally seconds. Unless they really want to be there, website visitors won’t stick around on a loading screen. Reducing file sizes as much as possible and good website hosting will ensure your site loads fast and retains your audience.

What’s included in a website design?

It hard to know exactly what you need to get online, with extras and monthly addons being chucked your way, left right and centre. The essentials come down to a domain, hosting & website design – but if you’re working with a designer, you’ll need to really understand your business direction to get the best results.

Consultation – An initial chat to get an overview of your business and services is a great way to determine if the agency or freelancer is a good fit for your project. Here we should discover and really outline your business services, who your ideal customers are and how this relates to your branding, goals and ethics. 

Domain – Although most agencies will provide a domain name for you, I strongly recommend you purchase this yourself via 123reg or similar. A domain is usually cheap (£20 per year) and means you stay in control of your website url, especially if the agency stops trading, you can easily move your site elsewhere.

Hosting – Hosting is required for every website to stay online 24/7. You’re essentially paying for another computer to keep your website live. But there are limits, so picking a good hosting provider is important, especially if you want your business to grow – we cover more about website hosting and the environmental impact in our services.

Design – Images, text, moving parts, pop-ups, sliders and more. Website design is very much in the hands of your designers’ artistic flair, along with the basic of website design, you can pretty much do whatever you want here – but it’s important to remember who your customer is and what they’re looking for, not what you think they are looking for. 

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website found on search engines. There are countless options here, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, backlinking, content and much more. If you’re serious about SEO, find a reputable agency to service this sector. As standard, our trades website design comes with on-page SEO giving your site the best chance of getting noticed, we also go into more detail about SEO in our SEO for trades blog.

So....How much does a website design actually cost?

Websites can vary in cost and very much depends on what you expect to recieve. To give you a general idea:

  • DIY Website Builder – £1000 or less
  • Custom Built Website (Freelance) – £1000-£10,000
  • Agency All Singing and Dancing –  £10,000+

 

When working with a designer or an agency, it will benefit you to do your research, check the portfolio of work, and even talk to a few of their previous clients to understand the level of service pre and post design.

Our trades website designs are affordable and bespoke to your business, covering all of the design basics with localised on-page SEO included to give your website the best chance at ranking. Contact us to find out how much our websites cost, and don’t forget to view our portfolio to view all of our previous designs!

Website Design From Only £999!

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