Pricing
A website is two things, design and features. Design relates to layout, typography, colour, and animation. Features have to do with business logic, for example, payment processing and reservation systems. As I always design to reflect your brand, price is primarily determined by feature requirements.
- £1,500 — £4,000: features are typically limited to one to three. Examples: a website for a freelancer, small business, or a restaurant.
- £4,001 — £9,000: feature requirements are more complex. You may conduct a part of your business online, such as sales and booking. You may also just have a lot of content. Examples: e-commerce, a yoga studio website with a booking system, and a company website with several practice areas and teams.
- £9,001 or more: feature requirements resemble a web app. Examples: a larger e-commerce platform or an early iteration of a start up idea.
These fees are one off. All projects also come with a headless CMS. This means you will be able to use an editor-friendly user interface to add and change content without touching the code or altering the styling of the website.
Hosting and domain
Hosting refers to where a website’s code lives and gets executed on the cloud. Domain has to do with the url that someone puts in the browser address bar to find your website. You should budget for both. The cost should be small, however.
Hosting
The fee depends on your site’s traffic and complexity. It also depends on whether I host for you or I help you set up an account with a hosting provider.
If I host for you, you don’t need to do anything, you just pay me. In most cases, the fee is £5 a month. In any case, the cost is unlikely to exceed £20 a month, unless your site has huge traffic like Facebook and Amazon.
If I help you set up an account, you pay the hosting provider directly and nothing to me. Many hosting providers include a free usage allowance. You therefore only start paying after your usage exceeds the allowance. However, you need to manage your own account.
Domain
I recommend all my clients to own their domains. Your domain name is a valuable asset. The only person who should own it is you. I can suggest places where you can buy a domain. The cost varies depending on how valuable the domain is. In my experience, I pay £20 or less a year for a domain.