What do I need to ask a website designers?

If you don't know much about website design yourself then there a few questions you may want to ask before deciding who you want to develop your website. You can always ask several companies the same questions and then compare the services and prices - just make sure that you are comparing like with like.

How much will it cost?

Now this will depend on what you want your website to do for your business. Some designers will charge by the website, by the hour, or will supply a quote based on information that you give them.

How much will the ongoing costs be?

Clients don't always ask this question but it's important that you know the initial set up costs and any ongoing costs since some website systems have monthly charges.

Will you be able to change the website yourself?

Now we realise that you don't want to become website designers since you're busy running your business but there may be a time when you want to add some information.  Find out upfront whether you can do that yourself or whether you have to pay a developer to do it or if you have to buy special software. If you need special software how much will this cost?

What if you want to change the look and feel of the website?

Websites need to be reviewed and updated every few years. This isn't simply a way for web designers to earn more money but there are changes in the way that people use websites and these changes need to be incorporated into websites. Some years ago you wouldn't have seen links to social media on website but now they are usually on every website.  Likewise people's tastes change and a website can be changed to add a new logo, to change the colors or simply to move things around a little bit. How easy will that be to do? What costs are associated with it?

For clarification here are our answers to those questions.

How much will it cost? We'll talk to you about you require for your business and maybe fill in some forms to make sure that we've understood exactly what you need. Based on that we'll give you a quote and we charge by the hour. To give you an idea a basic WordPress website with about three pages and a basic custom template would be about $400.
Updated May 2020: costs have gone up a little since then so think more about from $2,000 upwards for a standard website.

How much will the ongoing costs be? You have to continue paying for the hosting and the domain name but there are no extra ongoing costs for the website design. The software we use are free Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Joomla. You only pay us for our skills when you use us.

Update May 2020: I only create WordPress websites now and have only been using WordPress for several years now.

Will you be able to change the website yourself? We supply technical documentation for the website and we can show you how to amend or add information yourself. If you use products like Microsoft Word then you'll be able to add and change information in WordPress and Joomla.

What if you want to change the look and feel of the website? That's not a problem. Both WordPress and Joomla have separate templates that can change the look and feel of the website. There are many free templates that you can use, low cost templates that you can buy or we can build you a custom made template. Changing from one template to another only takes a matter of minutes and the website comes with default templates. If you want us to build you a new custom made template then that can cost than $100 depending on how you want the template to look.

Let us know if you think we need to add any other questions to the list and answer them ourselves.

If you have any more questions please book a complimentary 15 minute call.

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