You can use a pre-built template.
There are plenty of pre-designed templates available online that you can use for free (normally with accreditation to the designer). These templates are usually basic and are an excellent option for websites such as personal blogs though they are not always kept up to date and can eventually fail to work. For a business, the designer credits (usually found in the footer) appear unprofessional. You may also need more advanced features to adapt it to suit your website, which a free template might not offer.
Plenty of paid-for templates are available, too and often come with built-in support and updates for a finite time. You can also usually remove the designer credits. Small businesses or those with a simple website can use this option to excellent effect with a little effort to adjust it to their needs. However, a pre-built template might be challenging to adapt to more complex websites.
The other issue with using something ready-made to keep costs low is you may need to pay a professional to help you get the website up and running. It will likely still be cheaper than a designer starting from scratch.
Larger companies or those with complicated websites will need to look at other options, such as using a web designer to tailor the site to the company’s requirements. The advantage of this approach is you will have a unique design. If you use an agency such as The Hideout, you will also benefit from our careful consideration of the user experience.
Who is designing the website?
There’s nothing to stop you from designing it yourself or getting your mate who ‘knows computers’ to do it for you. However, a poorly designed website can cost you hugely down the line if the design impacts its performance. A confusing checkout design could see carts abandoned, or a poorly positioned signup box could lose those all-important submissions.
Costs will increase with the experience and expertise of those who create the site. An experienced designer will know how to make a website look nice and on-brand with complimentary colours, fonts, images, etc., and also understand how to optimise the layout and design to enhance the user experience.
We spend a lot of time working out the architecture for your website before we even start thinking about how it will look. We believe in laying solid foundations and building everything on top of this.
What sort of website do you want?
A website consists of different templates that follow your site’s basic structure but use a different design to accommodate what is being shown on the page. If you only need a homepage, you’ll only need one template. The cost for one page would depend on what you need on there and who is designing it.
A website solely for an online presence is likely to have a homepage, an about page, a contact page, and a services page. It might also include a news or events page, a blog, and legal pages such as a disclaimer. A designer will build and test each section, which can be time-consuming and therefore increase costs.
An e-commerce site will be much more complicated with templates needed for product pages, the basket page, checkout pages, customer account areas, self-help pages and more. The testing requirements for the website will also be more significant – designers and developers alike will need to spend time checking each page works as it should.
We factor in the pre-build, design, development, testing and deployment phases into our costs.
