Average Price of UK website designed?

When it comes to websites I would have thought this highly doubtful. Over the years I have come across more than a few sites that no doubt cost serious money and whose main benefit was to massage the designer's ego rather than benefiting his client - things already mentioned like all Flash sites and ones with graphic text not seen by search engines. The designer of one car website a few years back sent me an email explaining that his ethos was to leave site visitors with "a deep a meaningful experience": if you actually wanted hard facts about the car you put your name and address in a form and they sent you a brochure

- daft!

The equation surely is as with every other business expenditure: deciding what level of expenditure will be the most cost effective.

On Fri, 8 Aug 2003 09:24:16 +0100 "Glory Box" broke off from drinking a cup of tea at to write:

It depends upon one's intended audience. For maximum compatability and the widest possible audience, yes. However, teenagers desire Flash animations, children perhaps javascript animations.

Some adults also like "exciting" web pages. Making a web site compatible and interesting is a challenge, and that's why businesses should hire proper consultants to do the work, sadly they often hire graphic artists who make a lovely visual display on their own system only!

The golden rule is, a web page will not look the same on another system, so don't try to make it do so. Instead aim for functionality across the board, not uniformity.

Matt

On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:16:30 +0100 "Andy Jeffries" broke off from drinking a cup of tea at to write:

Who mentioned tables? I consider CSS as much a part as HTML as , perhaps I didn't phrase myself clearly. I meant no Flash, no Javascript &c. There's nothing wrong with using Perl CGI scripts either (to generate HTML documents).

I should NEVER advise tables for anything other than tabular data, they also confuse search engines, and take a time to be fully loaded and then rendered by the client computer.

Matt

Oh, no doubt! I'm not saying always pay top dollar, you'll find someone willing to rip you off. But don't pay bottom dollar, you will get what you pay for.

If you want my Vectra I'll sell it to you for £4.1M. You wouldn't want to pay that much right? However, if I offered it for £100 what state would you expect it to be in?

It's the same thing, you pay the bottom price you'll get a website that looks like it came out of someone's bottom. That doesn't mean you have to pay the top price - just don't look for the cheapest option.

Cheers,

Andy

On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:18:38 +0100 "Andy Jeffries" broke off from drinking a cup of tea at to write:

Playing devil's advocate. No it is not. All the current browsers have evolved from the NCSA Mosaic, and each has gone a different path, many add support for aditional non-standard mark up, but IE is the most widely used browser.

Matt

In article , Andy Jeffries writes

"Andy Jeffries" wrote

Ah, but the question was :-

You rightly point out that some work is *not* charged-out, and other work

*is* charged-out. But, at the end of the day (or rather more like the "end of the year"!) the web designer has worked X hours and received Y, hence the "hourly rate web designer is working for" is clearly Y/X. Of course this is simply an average of nil rates when working on something where no money is being charged, and a higher amount when work is being charged - but if the "no charge" work is *required* in order to win the chargeable work, then you should not isolate the chargeable work; because it would not exist without the other, nil-charged work!

Trying to put it a little clearer :-

If you spend (say) 2 hours "winning" some work, then 8 hours *doing* the work, then you have spent 10 hours on that job. Even if you *charge* 8 x

35 = 280, you have only earnt at the rate of 28ph - because it took you 10 hours working to get that 280! [The 35ph is simply a man-made construct used to decide how much to charge. You could just as easily said "It'll be 280 all-in, gov!" rather than "8 hours @35ph" - but either way, you have spent the full 10 hours on the job.]

"Andy Jeffries" wrote

Even then, it depends *which* standards you are considering!

One example is those set by Microsoft, being the biggest player in the market - these are "standards" just as much as those that go through W3 consortium etc. All standards are only as "standard" as the organisation establishing them - some would say that, currently, Microsoft is just about the biggest "standard" out there (for general consumers at least / simple desktops).

I thought I was reasonably knowledgable about the various methods of website design..It just goes to show I know not as much as I thought, as i'd never heard of it.

I was doing really well up until recently, now the convo has gone over my head. It is interesting from my point of view, as I would describe myself as the average, savy, internet aware small business person. And already the convo has gone over my head. I consider my self way above average in the internet website knowledge domain. So thats another reason why you need someone who you can trust.

In article , Tim writes

...

... except from the client's POV!

"Alan Terry" wrote

But we are not talking about the client's POV - we are talking about the web designer's POV. Hence client's POV, in this respect, is irrelevant.

So, to sum up .... you don't get what you pay for.

Peter Saxton from London snipped-for-privacy@petersaxton.co.uk

In article , Tim writes

Except the original posting IIRC was entirely from the Client's POV, ie cost, not income.

"Alan Terry" wrote

EXACTLY! - From the client's POV, they are only interested in (total)

*COST*. They won't mind if you get some slow cobber taking ages, but getting paid minimum wage per hour, or you get a super-human web designer to do the work in double-quick time but getting paid much more per hour - as long as the final job done is the same!

When talking of payments per-hour (as we were just), you are necessarily coming from the POV of the person spending those hours on the job. Without the person doing the work, the hours mean nothing.

So my statement stands - considering "per hour" rates can only be relevant coming from the POV of the worker, *not* the client.

In article , Tim writes

EXACTLY!

The OP was trying to understand costs.

So my statement stands ;o) - considering the prices of websites can be so low people should realise what good value they can get.

We're not arguing here, Tim, we are making separate points.

A "good accountant"? Now... how do you find one of those? And when you have found him, how do you know he's good? Unless you know enough yourself about the job to judge!

SQL??? There you are talking about a serious commercial site. The great majority of businesses don't run an online shopping trolley, a dating agency, etc. Unless your website has to be a front to a database, you can do just about the lot with plain (well... IE6.x compliant:) ) HTML and a bit of javascript for buttons and such.

There is an even bigger fact that people overlook: unless you are an ideal mail order .com business (e.g. mail order condoms) you tend to get very little business through website hits. Most "real" businesses have to advertise in old style printed media, even if most of the leads then go to the website before contacting the vendor direct. This has all sorts of interesting implications for printed media... it is now very hard to find out where customers come from (because they all appear to come via the website but in reality they don't).

What you must do is make it work right with IE6.x, perhaps IE5.x (because a lot of non computer literate people bought a PC from PC World say 3 yrs ago and that's what they've got) and it ought to function with latest Netscape.

The above is easier to do with simple HTML of course, but with really trivial HTML you can't do tabular data for example, which makes for a very bland site. As soon as you get into the nicer features, you find HTML code which runs on IE6 and not on other browsers. Especially if you create it with Frontpage!! (guess why)

The thing to avoid, while allowing you to create a really nice site, is java, active-x, flash, and basically anything that doesn't run fast over a 56k modem link.

Another little tip which nearly all website designers overlook: make sure that if you PRINT a page, it doesn't get cut off on the RH side when printed. Very irritating for users as they have to switch their printer into landscape. There is a way to do this (to do with the widest graphic on the page, IIRC) but evidently very few people know it.