New company website and I haven't a clue.

connundrum

Hi,

Looking to price the complete setting up of a site for a friend's company. He has the domain registered, but has done feck all with it as he is unsure what to do - as unsure as I am.

So what we need is for someone to set up a site for us.

Basic front page, with maybe 5 further pages of products incl. pics etc. Contacts page, with max 5 e-mail addresses for the time being.
At the moment there is no need to think about online purchasing.
We need to be very searchable under maybe 10 - 12 keywords.

All of this may seem v simple to a lot of peeps, but it is well over my head. I know that we are not encouraged to recommend businesses (especially under this forum heading), but I just need to know what sort of costs I should have him consider i.e. hosting for a year, site build, maintenance etc.

All help welcome.

aidan_walsh

This thread will be for advice only. Any recruitment can be done on adverts.ie as per the charter.

XJR

You could get "lucky" and get someone to put one together for as little as a few hundred quid or if you go to one of the mainstream web dev houses you'll be talking thousands.

You really need to spec exactly what it is you want and I would suggest you start by googling web development sites and see what sort of money they charge for a requirement similar to yours.

heggie

it certainly won't be lucky if you get the job done for a few hundred, a quality job cannot be done for that price, and what's the point in wasting a few hundred when you'll be unsatisfied.

connundrum

Would it help if I posted a couple of sites I'd like to 'mirror'?

Dunno if that'd be cool like, again its just to got an idea on costing.

Bob the Builder

connundrum wrote: »

Would it help if I posted a couple of sites I'd like to 'mirror'?

Dunno if that'd be cool like, again its just to got an idea on costing.

Yah, i think that would be a good idea.

I could do a website for as little as 80 euro but that would just involve me purchasing a dingy template, putting my name on it and giving it to you... or I could a thousand euro job which would be a top quality design(well my deisgn abilites lack, but you get my point).

Hosting for a year, to be honest, I'd say 40 euro for web hosting per year, 30 euro for a .ie domain name (€10 for a .com/net/org). Web maintainence would probably be zero, because if a CMS* is put on the website, it will offer you and employees an easy way of keeping your website updated.

*CMS = Content Management System --> Ask your designer about this, as your designer will(should) know exactly what s/he is doing.

Regards,
Nev

Liam Byrne

nevf wrote: »

Yah, i think that would be a good idea.

I could do a website for as little as 80 euro but that would just involve me purchasing a dingy template, putting my name on it and giving it to you... or I could a thousand euro job which would be a top quality design(well my deisgn abilites lack, but you get my point).

*CMS = Content Management System --> Ask your designer about this, as your designer will(should) know exactly what s/he is doing.

And therein lies one of the initial tradeoffs; CMS = slightly larger initial cost, with very little ongoing cost vs no CMS = small charge every time you want to update it.

Roughly speaking, a half-decent, original design, 5-page site should set you back around 600 + VAT (remember the outline design needs to be done whether there's 1 page or 1,000 pages).

Beyond that, you're probably looking at what's ON those pages; image/product galleries, basic text and thumbnails, contact form, eCommerce, etc, and the sky's the limit, really.....

P.S. how many products are there ? While it may seem like you only need 5 pages, that'll depend on
a) how much info is there on each product; will you need a summary + detail page, something like Amazon
b) how many products are there, are there categories or searches required - if so, you're probably looking at a database-driven site in order to avoid have loads of individual pages

The Mighty Ken

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Roughly speaking, a half-decent, original design, 5-page site should set you back around 600 + VAT

Eh? Are you talking €600 for just the design element of the job or €600 for the project planning and requirements analysis, asset gathering and concepts, XHTML, CSS and DOM coding, site build, on-site SEO and deployment. If you're knocking out sites for €600, I would question that it would, in fact, be half decent. I'd say it would be a pile of steaming turd.

A decent brochure website, developed by seasoned professionals, should set you back no less than €2,500.

PixelTrawler

The cost will depend on the hourly rate applied and the size of the agency

A solo dev could in theory work for €20 an hour and spend the following to get the site up and running.

Meetings with client 4 hours
Design Photoshop 16 Hours
Template Code 24 Hours
Add Content 4 Hours
Hosting arrangement and Seo 4 Hours

Roughly a grand.

But the design and coding can very hugely - factors such as complexity, speed and experience of the developer, amount of content and requirements etc

Its funny how many companies/people balk at the idea of shelling out a grand on a site (or even less at times) but think nothing of plowing thousands into ads that have very short life - local papers etc

But basically its time x rate

connundrum

Ok that you for the guestimates thus far. I'm pretty sure that my mate will heed advice and plough maybe €3k+ behind a decent website, as I come from a print ad background and can vouch for the absolute waste of money that paper ads can be.

The vital thing is that we are as searchable as possible - can this be bought, considering actual searches probably won't bring him up the rankings for a good 6 months+? I'm hesitatant to advise google ads at the moment.

PixelTrawler

Well as you say google ads are an option...

However if you dont want to pay for ads...

SEO is not an exact science I've found. For instance Yahoo seems to pay more heed to meta tags then google.

Google looks at site content and its page ranking system is a popularity contest. It looks at who links to you and who links to them.

A link from a big site like rte.ie or boards.ie will carry more weight then a small site.

Theres a few things to get right on your site. Search Engines cant read images so its important that menus are text not graphics. All images should have title/alt tags. Make your site (and content) as search engine friendly as possible.

Also dont expect to get into the search results instantly - it can take a while...

Google is the key engine of course. Its worth looking at google analytics and adding your site direct to your google account. Add a sitemap file to tell google what pages to look at, importance of each page that kind of think.
Look under webmaster tools on google for this.

Engines in order of importance:
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
The rest...