How much does web designing cost?

Life Technology
1

Thanks to a generous Forumosan, we have the opportunity to host our website for free, but we still need a volunteer webmaster. We are waiting to hear back from a designer, here in Kaohsiung, who may be able to do it for free, but he may not have enough time to keep the site updated on a regular basis. So we are considering paying a professional to do it for us.

We have no clue what the cost is, and from what we are told, prices vary a lot from one designer to another. Why is that?

We have decided to start from scratch and what we need is a website that would look pretty much like this one: www.animalstaiwan.org It’s a pretty big site. (We want a Linux based site)

We don’t want to re-invent the wheel. What I mean by that is that on their site, there is a load of info regarding pets and animals, and instead of having internal tabs, we hope that some tabs on our website would simply be external links directing to information pages on the Taipei website. I assume this would be less work than to re-program these pages altogether, hence why I say we hope not to re-invent the wheel. In other words, some of the programming(templates) would be available to our designer to just cut, paste and do minor changes.

We basically want to make some of the information hosted on the Taipei site available for the Kaohsiung folks who read our website, but not only that. AT is growing fast and 2007 is going to be a very busy year. We want to further amalgamate our efforts to better reflect the fact that we are becoming a national foundation. Other things that are relevant to us in Kaohsiung would have to be programmed from scratch; Things such as animals for adoption, contacts, etc.

We have ongoing events that need promoted on our website, new animals need to be added to the site, newsletters, etc. So the site needs to first be designed, and then it needs to be updated on a regular basis, probably weekly. The information would be sent to the designer by us, and then added to the website by the hired designer.

So the question is how much are we looking at paying for this job if we decide to hire a designer? If anyone has a website that was professionally designed by a hired designer, would you care to share with us how much it cost you?

Also, if we do decide to hire a designer, what should we keep an eye out for? What are the questions we should ask the designer to find out if he/she is the right person for what we need done?

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide us with. We know squat about this website stuff.

2

[quote=“bobepine”]Thanks to a generous Forumosan, we have the opportunity to host our website for free, but we still need a volunteer webmaster. We are waiting to hear back from a designer, here in Kaohsiung, who may be able to do it for free, but he may not have enough time to keep the site updated on a regular basis. So we are considering paying a professional to do it for us.

We have no clue what the cost is, and from what we are told, prices vary a lot from one designer to another. Why is that? [/quote]

Chris, Web designers are a little like cars, why do some cost far more than others, experience and ability to understand what you want / need and then deliver it. Somebody who seems very cheap to start with may not end up so as they may have to come back to many times for design issues etc.

[quote=“bobepine”]We have decided to start from scratch and what we need is a website that would look pretty much like this one: www.animalstaiwan.org It’s a pretty big site. (We want a Linux based site)

We don’t want to re-invent the wheel. What I mean by that is that on their site, there is a load of info regarding pets and animals, and instead of having internal tabs, we hope that some tabs on our website would simply be external links directing to information pages on the Taipei website. I assume this would be less work than to re-program these pages altogether, hence why I say we hope not to re-invent the wheel. In other words, some of the programming(templates) would be available to our designer to just cut, paste and do minor changes.[/quote]

Something to consider then would be to host it on the same machine as animalstaiwan. I don’t know if Sean hosts his own site or how he has his put together, but if done correctly then it could be very easy to host the two together, only thing Sean would need to do is set up virtual domains on his current server.

[quote=“bobepine”]We basically want to make some of the information hosted on the Taipei site available for the Kaohsiung folks who read our website, but not only that. AT is growing fast and 2007 is going to be a very busy year. We want to further amalgamate our efforts to better reflect the fact that we are becoming a national foundation. Other things that are relevant to us in Kaohsiung would have to be programmed from scratch; Things such as animals for adoption, contacts, etc.

We have ongoing events that need promoted on our website, new animals need to be added to the site, newsletters, etc. So the site needs to first be designed, and then it needs to be updated on a regular basis, probably weekly. The information would be sent to the designer by us, and then added to the website by the hired designer.

So the question is how much are we looking at paying for this job if we decide to hire a designer? If anyone has a website that was professionally designed by a hired designer, would you care to share with us how much it cost you?

Also, if we do decide to hire a designer, what should we keep an eye out for? What are the questions we should ask the designer to find out if he/she is the right person for what we need done?

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide us with. We know squat about this website stuff.[/quote]

With regard to cost, then you need to have a thorough understanding of exactly what you want, and where you are prepared to bend a little to save costs. Also be prepared to spend a little time to learn how to do it, it is not that difficult, and then you are saving the designer cost. Websites can cost anything from a minimum of probably NT$ 20k and the sky being the limit, size and complexity of the site being the two most important factors.

As for questions to ask, treat it as you would any other project, ask them how they manage their projects. The first thing they should be asking for is an in depth design scenario, ie how do you want the site to work, look like etc. No-one can give an accurate cost without it.

After that the next step in the process would be for them to produce some sample templates, ie their ideas based on your design input as to what the pages would look like. The Design phase is by far the biggest impact onto cost, the rest is all content, a lot of which you can provide to the designer to just upload.

The design phase if got wrong can result in a complete rewrite of the site, and a good website designer will allow for some of this within their pricing, as misunderstanding between you and the designer will always occur, plus you might change your mind part way through, hence the need for you to really decide what it is you want.

Also keep it a simple as possible in design terms, again the more complicated it is the more expensive.

The above points should put you in a good position to start, though there are others out there much better at it than me.

3

very true
What you pay is what you get.
Get a html or php website and the change of your webmaster will not cause too much trouble. If it is flash make sure you get a good documentation on the source code.

4

Chris, IMHO never use flash for an entire website, it is the worst possible medium. Personally i don’t like it on sites generally anyway, but way to many locally developed sites have far to much flash built in to them.

5

Thanks for the solid reply, Traveller. :notworthy:

20K is a lot… :frowning: More than I thought it would cost for sure. Mind me, I don’t even know how much time it takes to do this so, yeah… Your post helps.

We may have to bite the bullet and get it done. We need it. I’m hoping that since some of the templates would be available and already programmed, the cost would be less. I’m going to post a request for a volunteer webmaster now.

Cheers, mate!

6

[quote=“robi666”]very true
What you pay is what you get.[/quote]

Hah hah hah hah hah. If only.

Web design is one of the world’s biggest bullshit industries. There is no correlation whatsoever between price and ability.

With that said, do not pay more than NT$1,000/hr, which will get you a first-class designer if you look hard enough. Insist on an itemised invoice, and look at it carefully. If it says “6 hours - interaction concept”, you’re getting screwed. I can recommend a guy for initial design, if you like, but I don’t think he’d want the ongoing maintenance work (not enough spare time).

Another option you should think about is getting a Content Management System (CMS) going so that you can do updates yourself with minimal effort - in the long term it will save you time and money, but only if a) You get it done right, and b) Your content is pretty regular.

CMS systems are actually what I write day to day, but I’m probably not the guy you want to hire - my languages and tools are too obscure. With that said, I’d be more than happy to give advice and support - send me a PM.

Anyway, back to my original point: 98% of web “designers” are wildly overpriced and incompetent. Be careful about hiring anyone.

7

Hi Brendon,

The site that we have up at the moment is our old site. The new site was cancelled because we didn’t want to pay three times more than what most reliable hosts would charge us… Long story… And that’s why we are in the middle of redoing everything. We lost a whole bunch of info. Not pleasant, but in the end it will be worth it.

Your warning scared me… But you sound like you know what you are talking about. Thanks for the heads up!

The CMS thing is what we had on our second website(the one that was cancelled) We found it had ups and downs and many limitations, but I guess it depends how well done it is.

I might contact you later about this and see if you can integrate that to the next website we are soon to be working with.

Cheers!

8

Chris

Not sure if you ever get to Taipei, or if you are coming up soon, if so would be happy to sit down with you and give you some pointers.

It is all to easy to over complicate websites. Designers always want to use the latest gimmicks and all to often the customer does not really understand what is being talked about. CMS can be a useful tool, but requires careful setup to make sure that the customer can really use it effectively.

Also consider doing your own hosting, websites can be run on reasonably low spec machines with much of the software requirements can be had for free.

9

bobepine,

I’d second Brendon’s approach as the long term cost effectiveness route. There are free templates and open source CMS’s you can choose from. Some are easy enough that in your free time, you can be the “webmaster”.

In short, to know what you really want, you should write down the things that you want your site to be able to do (e.g. allow easy content upload/download/adds/deletes, place for people to share ideas - forum/blog etc). Don’t just look at the “visuals” of a site to decide what you want your site to do. Look to the “logic” of what your site should do and keep that simple and minimal. Less is more.

Good luck,

10

[quote=“Brendon”][quote=“robi666”]very true
What you pay is what you get.[/quote]

Hah hah hah hah hah. If only.[/quote]

:laughing: :bravo:

I agree. It’s better if you don’t have to contact your webdesigner every time you want to change something. Furthermore, using a non-obscure CMS would make it easier to change the designer or webhost afterwards (you won’t depend on a “guru” who’s the only one who knows how the site works).

Exactly. Chris, did you get my PM with the example site using Wordpress I sent you a while ago? Of course you have to image some dog pictures instead of the standard template pictures and the idea of having static pages and blog tags can be confusing at first, but I still think it could be used as a simple (and easy to update) CMS.

11

[quote=“bobepine”]Thanks for the solid reply, Traveller. :notworthy:

20K is a lot… :frowning: More than I thought it would cost for sure. Mind me, I don’t even know how much time it takes to do this so, yeah… Your post helps.

We may have to bite the bullet and get it done. We need it. I’m hoping that since some of the templates would be available and already programmed, the cost would be less. I’m going to post a request for a volunteer webmaster now.

Cheers, mate![/quote]

20K is not a lot. I paid for my website and web forum to be done. I knew what I wanted.

It was put together using Dreamweaver. I do the updates and other maintanence myself with dreamweaver.

You should also get your own web mail server along with any websites.

Just my 20K worth lol