Website design - Caz Limited

The baseline budget for bbc.co.uk for 2008-9 is £114.4 million¹. Even spread over two hundred sites, that’s a lot. If you are in an average SME, you probably just want a rough guide to start with without having to read through everything below, so consider 7.5% of web turnover with a minimum of £3000pa.

Entry level websites are particularly hard to quantify because so much depends on whether or not you have any kind of existing design style. Moving on quickly to what's more 'normal' for us these days: a finger-in-the-air estimate for the design component of a typical content-managed website - ie one where you can update at least some part of it yourself - will be between £1000 and £2000 for a treatment followed by £3000 to £8000 for its execution. Though clearly if the website is particularly large or complex the figures will rise accordingly.

Now that's out of the way, time to get down to business. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered:

• Do you already have a style that you want to follow? That can make quite a saving.
• Do you have a graphic designer that you would prefer to use and just use us for the technology part? Again a saving on our costs.
• Web-based brochures and catalogues frequently cost less and present better value for money than their printed equivalents. Should you consider scaling back conventional print work? Some of our clients have done this, whilst others feel that their particular customer base responds better with a brochure in hand.
• Equally, web-based shops are usually much more cost-effective to operate than their High Street equivalents. Though if you need to create a whole online catalogue with pictures, that's going to cost quite a lot more.
• The running costs of a website will include web hosting, almost certainly database hosting and optionally a secure certificate for ecommerce transactions. In addition, you should budget some of somebody's time to keep the website up to date. Out of date websites lose business.
• If the website turns into a big slice of your business, should you be upgrading your website and database hosting to improve its resilience against Internet threats? Your revenue stream may be at stake.
• If we get asked to tender and there's no treatment payments involved, that immediately puts a 30% premium on the cost.

One of the really good things about a website is that you can build it up over time. You don't have to meet all your costs at once.

Compare your website to opening a retail outlet

If you replace the word website with the word shop in your thinking, then you will quickly realise (if you haven't already) that the costs and risks of a website are far, far lower.

How long does a website last?

Three to five years usually, though one for a specific event eg a one-off festival will obviously be much shorter. Websites that go stale - ie no change of content for months on end - tend to fall down the search engine rankings because they are perceived to be of less value. The reverse is also true: fresh websites go up the scale.

How much can it earn?

This is probably the more important question than how much it costs. Even with our entry-level commerce systems, some of our clients are enjoying substantial web sales - some measured in hundreds of thousands pa. However, success also brings criticality and the whole chain of website into the back office has to be made reliable and resilient - this requires proper investment.

¹ source: BBC Trust - Service Review p16

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