You’ve asked three people and been quoted six hundred pounds, two and a half grand, and nine. Nobody explained why, so now you’re wondering which of them is having you on.
Probably none of them. They’ve quoted for three fairly different things, and the question that helps isn’t which one is cheapest. It’s working out which one you were asking for in the first place.
The three things people mean by “a website”
The cheapest version is a theme that already exists, with your logo dropped into it and your words typed in. There’s nothing dishonest about that. For a business that mainly needs an address, a phone number and a bit of reassurance, it can be perfectly adequate. It will look like an off the shelf theme though. A few thousand other businesses have the same one, and sooner or later you’ll spot yours on a competitor’s site in a different colour.
The middle is where most of my work sits. Somebody works out what each page has to do before building it, so the layout comes from your content rather than your content being squeezed into a layout that arrived first. It’s put together so you can update it yourself, and so it’s still standing in five years. A good part of the price difference is right there, in the thinking, and then in building something to fit the thinking rather than the other way round.
Then there’s the version where the site has an actual job beyond telling people you exist. Taking bookings. Selling things. Letting members log in. Talking to a system you already use and have no intention of abandoning. Quotes climb steeply here, and not because anyone’s being greedy about it. You’ve stopped buying a website and started buying a small piece of software that happens to have a website wrapped around it.
What I charge
So that you’re not reading all this and still guessing:
- A small brochure site, from £500. A handful of pages, your own words, a nice simple platform to use.
- Designed and built properly, usually £1,250 to £2,500. Most of what I do sits here, and where it lands in that range depends mostly on how many pages there are and how much of it needs designing from scratch and will often sit under the Ridgeline Studio remit.
- Bookings, online shop, memberships and anything bespoke: quoted on its own. I’d rather look at what you actually need than put a number here that turns out to be wrong in both directions.
Hosting is £180 a year, and maintenance starts at £320 a year on top of that.
Where the money actually goes
Roughly in order of how badly people underestimate them:
- The dull conversations at the start, working out what your website needs to do. If you skip this you end up paying for it later down the line, with interest, in changes.
- Design. Somebody deciding how it looks, rather than a theme deciding on your behalf.
- The build itself, which is usually a smaller slice than people imagine.
- Anything bespoke. A booking system that matches how you actually work, rather than how the plugin author assumed you work. Estimates go wrong here more than anywhere else, almost always because nobody asked the right question in week one.
- Testing and the last ten per cent, which takes roughly as long as the first ninety.
Content
This is the one nobody puts on a quote, and it’s the reason most websites run late.
It isn’t the developer. It’s the words. They sit on somebody’s list underneath everything that has a customer attached to it, and there they stay. I’ve written separately about why I’ll usually ask you to write them yourself, and I stand by it, but there’s a cost attached and the cost is time rather than money. If writing isn’t your thing, a copywriter is a real line in the budget, and a cheaper one than a site sitting at ninety per cent finished from March until September, you can read more about this here.
The part that keeps coming back
A build happens once. Running the site doesn’t.
Your domain, your hosting, and maintenance if you want somebody keeping an eye on it. These are much smaller numbers than the build, but they repeat, which makes them worth understanding before you sign anything rather than when the first renewal turns up.
How it’s billed
Half up front, which is what gets the work into my diary, and the other half before the site goes live.
Nothing hidden in between. If something turns up that changes what we agreed, you hear about it when it turns up, not in a final invoice that’s bigger than the intital quote.
One practical note. If you’re a new business and still waiting on a bank account, say so. I’ve held off on the first invoice before now and it’s a good deal less awkward than people expect.
When the cheap option is the right one
Sometimes it is, and I’d rather tell you than take the work. Three pages that will never change, nobody but you ever needing to edit them, and you’ve made peace with it looking like it cost what it cost. Go and use a builder. Keep your money.