What a website actually costs, and what you’re paying for

Most quotes for a website are a single number with nothing behind it. That number is doing a lot of work: it is covering research, design, build, content, testing and whatever goes wrong. When it turns out to be wrong, the part that gets cut is almost always the part you cannot see.

What you are actually buying

A website is four things bought at once, and they have very different costs.

• Strategy — deciding what the site is for and who it has to convince.
• Design — the part everyone looks at, and the smallest share of the work.
• Build — making it fast, accessible and possible to change.
• Content — the words, which almost nobody budgets for and which decide whether any of it works.

Why the cheap quote costs more

A quote that comes in at a third of the others has usually dropped strategy and content. You get something that looks like a website and says nothing, and then you pay a second time to have it written properly.

The other common saving is the build. A site assembled from a template and eleven plugins is cheap to produce and expensive to own: every plugin is someone else's deadline, and the day one of them breaks is the day you find out.

What to ask before you sign

Three questions tell you most of what you need to know.

1. What happens when I want to change a page myself?
2. Who owns the hosting, the domain and the code?
3. What is not included?

What we do

We quote the four parts separately, so you can see what you are paying for and decide what to drop. Nothing is hidden in a round number.