What a small business website should cost
Nobody will tell you what a website costs, which is why the question is asked so often and answered so rarely. Here is the honest version: the price depends almost entirely on how much of it is decisions and how much of it is typing.
That sounds evasive. It is not. A five page site for a business that knows its own text, has its own photographs and wants one contact form is a different job from a site that has to take orders, hold accounts and talk to a till, and the gap between them is not twenty per cent, it is a multiple.
What actually moves the number
- How many decisions are still open. A brief that says "something like this, with our words" is cheap. A brief that needs the structure, the words and the photographs worked out is a bigger job, because that is the part that takes the thinking.
- Whether anything has to log in. Accounts, orders, bookings, dashboards. The moment a site has users it has permissions, and permissions are where the real work is.
- Whether money changes hands. A checkout brings payments, refunds, failures, VAT and somebody’s Saturday night when a card is declined.
- Whether it has to talk to something else. A till, an accounts package, a stock system. Two systems agreeing continuously is more work than either of them alone.
- Who writes it. Words are the part everybody underestimates. A site waiting six weeks for copy has cost you six weeks.
What the number should not depend on
How big your business is. We quote the job, not the company, and the same system costs the same whether it is built for one shop or five. A quote that moves when you mention your turnover is not a quote, it is a guess at what you will pay.
The three things to insist on in writing
- A fixed price against a fixed timeline. Not a day rate with an estimate attached. An estimate transfers the risk of a bad estimate onto you.
- What happens to the code and the data if you leave. You should be able to take both. If you cannot, the low price is rent.
- What is explicitly excluded. The honest answer to this tells you more than the feature list does.
The ongoing cost, which is the one people forget
Hosting, a domain, certificates, security updates, backups with a restore somebody has actually tested, and small changes. A site nobody maintains does not stay the same, it decays, and the decay shows up as a slow page and a broken form long before anybody notices.
What we do: a fixed price against a fixed timeline, in writing, within 48 hours of understanding what you need, and it does not move afterwards. The build side is on web design, and what keeping it going covers is on ongoing support.