My friend's partner is looking to set up a website for his business. He only wants a very basic site consisting of some informative text about himself and the services offered, some photos and a couple of embedded videos, and possibly a contact form (although a simple mailto link would suffice). In addition to having the site created they'd need search engine optimisation. My question is, what should a site like this cost if they pay a professional to do it?
Sounds like they don't need to pay a professional to pull together a website like that. A service like www.squarespace.com will pull together a very nice looking website and you wouldn't need a professional to build it. Make some choices, enter a few details = Basic website. "Search engine optimisation" can mean a lot of different things to different people. At it's most basic it's having a website that wasn't built by muppets, and content that covers the areas that are relevant. You don't need to do anything more than that. There's no guarantee any website about anything will show up top in the search rankings as the search algorithms are so based on popularity. So if the business is called "Zobglob zombies" it's very easy to get it to show up under Zobglob or Zobglob zombies... but there's a million other websites that will be higher up the search rankings for zombies. Don't expect miracles and don't trust anyone who will charge high fees to deliver miracles. Edit: As to professionals costs. How long is a piece of string? A small one man band may set something up for him for a few hundred quid. Someone else may walk him though squarespace over a beer. Somebody else may have services that start at £20k.
I've made more complicated sites in the past myself but it's definitely not an area I'd consider myself knowledgeable in, and I'm certainly not up to date. The cheapest quote my friend's had is $1500 and others have been as much as $6000 which I simply couldn't believe. I'm going to make a site for them myself because it'll be a bit of fun for me and could apparently save them a lot of money, but something like Squarespace is an option too and one my friend's started looking into. I just couldn't believe people would charge so much for something like that.
You can also use any CMS like Wordpress to built basic website. Very easy to setup, maintain and manage
