Hi, My sister is setting up her own small business, and needs to set up a web site. She got a quote for £1660 for a 5 page website, with flash, which sells 20 products, and has secure payment facilities such as pay pal/price calculator. Is that a good price for a site of that size? The designers are claiming large costs for the payment system. Any help would be good, thanks in advance.
Payment via PayPal isn't especially complicated, but it can take a little while to put together. I avoid Flash whenever possible (which means anything except embedding video really) for a number of reasons, but that's down to your (or your sister's) preference. What is she selling? Are you doing any sort of shopping cart, or just buy now links? I haven't used PayPal's built-in shopping cart system for a number of years, but I thought it was fairly easy at the time and my web skills were nothing fantastic back then. If they're doing a custom thing or an off-the-shelf system like OSCommerce*, that could well be wasting a lot of time on something that's more complicated than it needs to be. For what I currently charge, I expect that I would end up at somewhere around that range once I convert $ to £, but looking at the person/place's past work to get a judgment of quality will probably go further than anything else.
She's got one quote, now tell her to get 5 more. Ask for examples of what the company has designed previously. Seconding avoiding Flash in this case.
Thanks for your replies. Is good to hear from people who are in the know I think the price includes hosting for the first year, than there is a fee to host and for editting or something after that. I told her the flash might not be the best, but she seems quite keen on having buttons that move into posistion or something, is it bad because of filters thinking it's a pop up, or is it because people might not have the lattest updattes? I think she just wants buy it now links rather than a shopping cart. Taking your advice I rang up a friend who does web design, and though he's to busy to take on any more prodjects he did give an idea price wise. I'll advice her to ring up a couple more designers first.
Be carefull about flash, if the whole website is in flash then it may not be seen by search engines. make sure they do a "seach engine friendly" flash site so it can be seen by search engines.
If she wants animations, use Javascript. It degrades about 1000x more gracefully if implemented well. You can do a pretty good portion of it just in CSS if you know what you're doing (though admittedly you need to write some rather weird code if you want it to work right in IE6). While I'm no designer, I can make buttons move slide around and have hover states and all that fun stuff pretty quickly, and the most I've ever done with Flash is embed Youtube videos and that kind of stuff. Honestly, I'd avoid dropdown menus too, if she's thinking of going that route. More often than not, they're poorly implemented so they always retract at just the wrong time - I have problems with this even at really big sites like Newegg, and they're dealing with at least nine figures in revenue annually. For five pages, I assume you're just looking at a home, about, contact, product list, and one other page, or something along those lines. Just a simple top navigation setup and maybe two columns of ten products on the appropriate page would do the trick. Rigging up the paypal is fairly quick (I looked into it again today as someone else was asking me about it - my recent experience is with much more complex integrations: automated subscription renewal, etc); hardest part IMO is finding or making a good design. /must stop doing free consulting
Just wondering, why if its a small company (20 products isn't a lot) doesn't she go for one of the "off the shelf" packages such as cubecart (just to name one, there are loads) which offers integration with paypal etc? Chances are she'll get it free with any decent webhost and it'll save her a tonne of cash. Sounds like the host require a "maintenace fee" so you could end up paying through the nose just to get a new page added or some new products put into the DB... Just a thought
http://www.actinic.co.uk/index.shtml Its a program we used to use for our e-commerce site. Its worth looking into doing it yourself, if you have a modicum of PC knowledge. All you would have to do then is set up a Hosting service. Try 1&1, and a secure payment server Try ProtX or your local bank. Goodluck
