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Why is there such a huge variation on pricing for websites?

There’s no denying that refreshing your website regularly is important. Some people, however, are afraid to ask, because they feel:

  • “It’s too expensive”
  • “It’s not a priority right now”
  • “We don’t have the time”
  • If I ask now, you’re going to be hassling me to decide and I’m not ready yet

Now, with other suppliers who use themes and templates, they charge less because they skip the briefing, design, design tweaks, HTML, and WordPress coding parts of the project. The theme gets downloaded, unpacked, built with supplied content, and launched. It’s definitely still specialist work but it takes less time overall.

At TLD, we don’t use themes as there are restricted layout options and hidden surprises (bugs, errors, missing page types) that we prefer to avoid. More on this here.

However, with the TLD Loyalty Club, taking things step by step, payment plans, swaps, and special favours, we find ways to work with startups, one-man bands, and extremely budget-conscious people. They then see positive results for their businesses and stick with us for new projects.

We’re talking to a new potential client who wasn’t afraid to ask and I created a comprehensivee answer her. Most of the time, the variation in pricing is due to 2 factors:

  1. Size of the website – as in – number of pages. This affects both design time, coding time, time spent entering images and text, and project management. We design each page according to the purpose of the page, build everything based on the chosen design and ensure the areas of that page are all updatable in a straightforward way via WordPress and using custom code. If the website is a “multipanel” landing page/homepage, like www.infantsuccess.co.uk, it has links at the top to jump down to different panels, our coders build each panel separately and make sure each is separately updateable. On other sites, we have these panels on the homepage, and also on other pages. Some pages have just one area and some have multiple areas. The navigation links at the top go to different sections of the site, and there are sometimes subpages. These larger sites on average have 15-40 different pages. www.lewiscraig.co.uk, for example, has approx. 25 pages plus 3 areas which are updateable with content (they update the restaurant and retail pages with multiple properties, plus the blog)
  2. Functionality: – In some cases, we plan, design and code additional functionality, such as recruitment job boards (www.trg-uk.com), extensive searchable filterable catalogues (www.farley.co.uk), online shopping capabilities (www.anthologyfive.com), and searchable databases of content (www.udaya.com). We also sometimes do special code for SEO like “event tracking” (to allow us to track is people are submitting certain forms / visiting specific pages on a site) and “rich snippets” where search results come pre-formatted to increase the likelihood of people clicking through – we did this for Snowbizz (www.snowbizz.co.uk) and Aspire Leadership (www.aspire-leadership.co.uk) for ski accommodation/specific training courses to show up in Google search results.

This is why it’s possible to work within smaller budgets – the design quality and coding quality is not something we compromise on, but a client can choose to start with a site that has fewer pages, and with no special functionality aside from the ability to update the site themselves – which is possible even in our lower-priced sites.

If you’d like to get an idea of what it would cost to do a new website for you, please get in touch and we’ll scope out your needs and provide a proposal with recommendations!

Tagged in:
  1. money
  2. pricing
  3. quotes
  4. Website Design

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