Website design/SEO

[Rhodri27]

Hi all,

just seeing if there are any web designers/SEO experts on here, just looking for some advice in getting a new site up. I have the domain name but the amounts i have been quoted to build and manage the site range from next to nothing to stupendous amounts each month.

What would be a fair amount for a basic website with a few pages and a contact us type form along with getting it up the google rankings for a few key words. As you can tell this isn't my strongest subject so if i sound like i'm talking crap then just say

Rhodri

[Frimley111R]

Lots do this for a few hundred pounds. Don't forget you'll need to write copy for it (or pay them to do it). It'll get you going but obviously won't perform as well as more pricey option. Essentially you get what you pay for.

[DSLiverpool]

Ecomm or brochure ?

[jonamv8]

A grand for basic brochure site and £100 a week for some basic SEO

[Rhodri27]

DSLiverpool said:

Ecomm or brochure ?

A website for a financial services company

[anonymous-user]

I'm retired from it now but the prices differ so much because it's all about time in dealing with you. This time needs to be paid for and from how I see how you have written your post people have quoted you for either the full service package ( which includes ummpteen phone calls and emails ) or a cheap there you go package ( copy and paste normally ) the job itself is easy but sometimes the customers aren't.

It's like the captain of a cruise liner, anyone can turn the wheel but he gets paid a fortune for knowing when to turn it.

As I said I'm retired and very capable of doing the job but got out because of having to deal with customers, the best way is to find someone starting out who is prepared to look after you as he has only a few clients, do a google search in your area and look for someone working from a residential address or who shares an office space with others. . . they will offer you the best value

Good luck

[bucksmanuk]

I think I’ll wade in here
I’m starting a new business which is car parts related and completely on-line (2020 - great timing I know…), and so I put out the word on a web business forum and had a few approaches.

A number wanted £5K before they had even understood what was required.

BT rang me up and offered to build a web site for £400, although they owned the web site and no doubt would charge a fortune to edit/add accordingly – forget it…

Another guy rang me whose accent was so Scottish I could hardly understand a word he was saying. Not a good start.

Another web site developer, very local to me, didn’t want the work as it was car related and he wasn’t into cars – yes really!

I built a design standards system, web based, nearly 20 years ago, so simple web pages, and an indexing system. Nothing like what goes on today, but I understand some of the technology.

I started off with a web site developer who said he knew what he was doing , and had built web sites for others. These looked OK to my eye. I really didn’t want anything flash at this stage and just a web site, all of which was editable by me. So something in WordPress, or similar.
No - he built one with a truly dreadful content management system, which only allows me editing rights over a small part of the site. The mistakes are truly epic, and actually testing it on a tablet/phone appears to be beyond him. He is so late with it, -it’s embarrassing. It’s so bad, I have had to write this work off, at a cost of £3K and have now gone with someone else.

On the new site- I can edit the whole lot (which comes with its own dangers), but I could also ask others to do the work as it has proven reasonably easy (so far) to edit the site.

Lesson learnt
Ask a lot of people for contacts. There are loads around now doing this kind of work.
Web site developers may not necessarily make great website designers.
Get non IT people to critique the prototype site regularly. They see things very differently.
Test it on different platforms, phones, tablets, Chrome, Bing, Brave, Opera, Apple - "if it works on one - it works on all" yeah .....right...
Your first web site should get you up and running, it doesn’t have to be some amazing Amazon beater, it will have some glitches in it, there will be mistakes, and the main thing is to get it up and running. Perfect never arrives anyway.
Ask people who really know IT/web technology to look at the web site developer’s current work.

[DSLiverpool]

bucksmanuk said:

I think I’ll wade in here
I’m starting a new business which is car parts related

If it’s many models, many variations and needs external database crosschecking I would be concerned if your paying under £15k - hopefully it’s not exact car model specific ?

[DSLiverpool]

Rhodri27 said:

Hi all,

just seeing if there are any web designers/SEO experts on here, just looking for some advice in getting a new site up. I have the domain name but the amounts i have been quoted to build and manage the site range from next to nothing to stupendous amounts each month.

What would be a fair amount for a basic website with a few pages and a contact us type form along with getting it up the google rankings for a few key words. As you can tell this isn't my strongest subject so if i sound like i'm talking crap then just say

Rhodri

Jon’s deal sounds amazing - use that 100% I might as well !

[bucksmanuk]

DSLiverpool said:

bucksmanuk said:

I think I’ll wade in here
I’m starting a new business which is car parts related

If it’s many models, many variations and needs external database crosschecking I would be concerned if your paying under £15k - hopefully it’s not exact car model specific ?

it sort of is...!

[anonymous-user]

• PS. I had forgotten a few years ago ( when we allowed in pubs) a few like minded mates and I threw down a private challenge to each other. . . Who could get to the number one slot in Google without paying; just buying random domain names all ( .com ) and using simply code them

The results were impressive. . . . In different categories we bought 4 .com's and went to work, within 72hours of the domains going live we had attained the prestigious and potentially on the verge of massive windfalls by being able to have the knowledge of getting No 1 slots for clients by using their industry keys words, meta tags etc. The 4 of us were ecstatic until 24hours later we were all bounced off Google and our other domain registrations were black listed for 'being naughty/too clever/ whatever you want to tag us with'

From a sales point of view and thus increasing your income, be wary of people/businesses who offer exceptional results with SEO as they maybe too good to be true in my humble experience.

[DSLiverpool]

bucksmanuk said:

it sort of is...!

There is a chap on here who spent thousands in trying to get a complex automotive site done cheaply, it was a major project that needed a full tech spec and a “what if” road map, I introduced him to a back end dev who could do it all for a price and told him exactly what was wrong with the current set up. However knowledge has a cost higher than the budget in that case.
Please don’t worship idol gods, giving them small amounts of gold for words not tangibles.
The site will need a full tech spec, I’d get this done turn look for a dev. Pretty Design isn’t crucial but UX is - it’s a big project.

[Canute]

jonamv8 said:

A grand for basic brochure site and £100 a week for some basic SEO

£100 a week is not going to move any dial but the bank balance in the wrong direction. Sorry.

[DSLiverpool]

Canute said:

jonamv8 said:

A grand for basic brochure site and £100 a week for some basic SEO

£100 a week is not going to move any dial but the bank balance in the wrong direction. Sorry.

A contract for £5k year is the same thing in a different form. Yes it’s front end loaded but also the client will increase budget as the results become apparent (ime)

[jonamv8]

Canute said:

jonamv8 said:

A grand for basic brochure site and £100 a week for some basic SEO

£100 a week is not going to move any dial but the bank balance in the wrong direction. Sorry.

We have real world clients who run very basic SEO campaigns on a small number of regional keywords for £100 week that produce results by virtue of them now being on page one of Google. Increased traffic to website converts into revenue for them, hence they continue to pay the fee. Note this is not SEO for ‘iPhone 12’ or ‘all inclusive holidays’ but for services/products in a specific location.

Original Post was very vague but the gist I got was tiny website with very basic SEO.

Maybe OP should elaborate ?

[jonamv8]

Rhodri27 said:

DSLiverpool said:

Ecomm or brochure ?

A website for a financial services company

Are you targeting business nationwide of a specific area?

[sgtBerbatov]

bucksmanuk said:

Another web site developer, very local to me, didn’t want the work as it was car related and he wasn’t into cars – yes really!

That's not unusual at all. Same way you'll get mechanics who won't touch a Nissan because they only ever really want to work on Toyotas.

bucksmanuk said:

Web site developers may not necessarily make great website designers.

Are builder's architects? No. Developers develop, designers design. Just because they build a website doesn't mean they can design one either.

[HantsRat]

Yes - We designer here. Drop me a message and i'll do my best to answer any questions you have

[Chamon_Lee]

OP I hope you don't mind me asking this on your thread and find it useful.

Can I ask how would we know that a "good website" has actually been developed? Visually yes we can see something looks nice or its been designed well but how would be know its been designed well in the back end or in the coding side of it for SEO posposes.

Every website builder/developer says they can do everything but how would we verify it.

[akirk]

Chamon_Lee said:

OP I hope you don't mind me asking this on your thread and find it useful.

Can I ask how would we know that a "good website" has actually been developed? Visually yes we can see something looks nice or its been designed well but how would be know its been designed well in the back end or in the coding side of it for SEO posposes.

Every website builder/developer says they can do everything but how would we verify it.

I think that you need to start by understanding the purpose of a website - and it will differ for every business.

At a simple level - it could be that when someone googles 'that amazing business ltd, Slough' they find your website and can confirm your address / telephone number / etc. - that could be a very simple website, it probably doesn't matter hugely how it is written - if you are the only business of that name in that location, Google will probably find you - crack on with something very cheap etc.

At a more proactive level, websites can be used for several purposes:

marketing / advertising - this is what many companies aim for - still a fairly static website, but one which will help bring in custom - the website needs to be structured correctly, but beyond that the reality is that most of the traffic will be brought in by what the business does elsewhere on the web - while SEO companies will tell you that they can magically tweak your content to make you a millionaire - in fact the current reality is a cynical Google indexing algorithm which is good at spotting SEO company attempts to game the system - and a limit to what you can do on your site - get the content right and appropriate, structure it well, keep images small, make it friendly across mobile and desktop etc. and you are starting to hit the limit of what you can do in the code... The reality is that like any physical business where you build an office - no one will come through the door unless they know of you - so the business needs to be out where the people are with brand awareness / advertising / sponsorship / etc. - all of which can feed to the website where the conversion may take place - but a website on its own out of the context of the rest of the web will do very little...

process based - increasingly companies are using the web to build their business processes (this is an area we specialise in, so we are seeing an increased adoption of it) - where companies might have once employed a member of staff to manage internal systems on a spreadsheet (or even card index system) increasingly they are moving to web based systems - with automation and a subsequent cost-saving in staffing (usually pays back very fast and we have had clients in the SME world saving millions in staffing over the years...) examples might be where clients request services through a portal, the system manages the process and staff simply log in to confirm / authorise / etc. - clearly these types of systems require zero SEO, and in fact the structure of the website is all about efficiency in managing large quantities of data - rather than how it looks - so professional / smart is good enough.

transactional - process based, but out in the wider market space - e.g. eCommerce is the general catch-all phrase, but websites can have differing levels, from a simple store system to a complex website into which is embedded an ordering system etc. - again, the structure needs to work for the system, but it may also be important that it works for Google - as with a marketing site, the majority of the sales funnel will happen away from the website on social media / forums / etc. not on the website - so structure needs to be fit for purpose.


this just gives a flavour of how businesses use the web - the reality is that it is unique for each company, so understanding how the underlying code works and if it is fit for purpose has to start with that company's context and needs - a pretty site with perfect SEO optimisation may be useless if the transactional side is clunky, the content poor and the conversion process weak - you might get 1,000,000 visitors a week, but if only one buys then the system is flawed...