web site designers -please help me answer this questions

[albosmum]

A friend is trying to start up a small business - and has been picking my very small brains about web site design - i have told her that i can produce very basic pages but she wants a ecommerce site with the shopping baskets etc - i told her she would need a professional web site designer- she has obtained one quote for £3000 - is this the going rate for a 20 page site with credit card paynment facilties etc.

Hi albosmum - my dh is in this line of business - will ask him when he gets in tonight (and also bumping this for you in case anyone else can help).

If it's done especially for her and her needs I think it's a good price, we charged about 8,000 for 20-25 pages without shopping baskets/payment facilities.

Now, if they are using templates (i.e. Shopcreator) she should expect to pay less than that.

thank you - is shopcreator a package that you can buy and if sso as i have basic web design skills would it be possible for me to get the hang of it

look at actinic as a package too

also depending on her business she may be able to get a grant..ask business link

she will have to pay a payment provider and bank for the payment facility too eg securpay or secure trading, worldpay plus merchant account

unless she only takes paypal

You can get paypal e-commerce for about £1500 around here, but £3000 is standard for normal 'proper' e-commerce. Just remind her, it involves a lot of handling fees, she'll get charged by the bank for a cc payment, by the credit card co for the payment and by the e-commerce payment handlers as well which is sometimes what makes paypal etc more usable, as you only get two lots of charges, as opposed to three!

look into paypal. If she is starting up a small business, then she doens't want allt he overheads. with basic html you should be able to create the site with her and incorporate paypal into it. If you go to their website there is info on shopfronts etc which you could then tailor for her.

I think actinic starts at around £400.00 you can download a test limited package to play with for free

what is she planning to sell? it's quite challenging to get customers! online advertsining is effective but expensive

I agree with the other comments.

£3000 for a site designed and built for her needs strikes me as a very good deal. Certainly we'd charge more than that!

Even using an "off the shelf" tool, I would expect that you would be charged a reasonable amount for a good design. Good designers aren't cheap, though there are a lot of cheap designers out there... Same for web development companies, come to think about it!

In my opinion you get what you pay for in web design and development and if it's your main interface to your customers, you should look to buy the best you can afford.

Regards,

Rob...

my site was 3500 thee years ago and i got a 50% eu grant

thank you for all your help - i wil pass this info on

SOunds cheap to me. Also design is very important though - especially if it is an e-commerce site. It has to be appealing, look professional and also very usable - not something you can just pick up in 5 mins. I think if a site looks amateurish it will put off most people.

I built mine for about 50.00 plus a monthly fee & domain name. People can buy stuff from it. If you would like to ahve a look at it email me on [email protected]. I did it myself and although it wasn't easy, once I had picked up the basics, it wasn't hard either. I also have unlimited pages. Depends what your mate is selling.

i have e-mailed you ucm from my gmail account

i keep getting your email bounced back - can you cat me the address ucm