Analysing Requirements for Your Web Site
Questions to Ask Yourself
What Benefits A Web Site Could Bring?
There are infinite reasons, but to name a few...
- Internet presence: a 24/7 shop front of your service or product
- Less Labour: requires little interaction on your behalf compared
to a shop, office or stall
- Economic Outlay: no rent, rates or insurance costs for the building/premises
- Space Saving: stock levels can be kept to a minimum
- Sales: web site sales can be automated paying directly in to your
account
- Marketing: you can reach an extended audience and communicate with
them
What Type of Web Site Would be Suitable?
Decide what you hope to achieve from your site and analyse your audience
and what they are looking for. Your site should be user friendly, easy
to read, information rich and efficient in running.
How Will You Manage Your Web Site?
Is the content likely to require frequent updates? If so, who will do
this? If the site needs updating on a monthly cycle, it would be cost
efficient to have a CMS (Content Management System) built so that you,
or someone with your permission can update the site from a web browser.
It may be costly to get a web designer to update content often when it
could be quicker and smoother to copy and paste the updated content into
a web form yourself.
Money and Costs Involved
When people ask how much a web site costs, it's the same as saying "How
long is a piece of string?". It depends on the workload required,
any licensing, hosting and domain registration costs that are required
for the site.
Domain Name Registration Costs
There are numerous domain suffixes available (e.g. .com,
.net, .biz, .me.uk etc.) costing different prices from different registrars.
As a guide, domain costs vary from £10/2 years for a .co.uk domain
and £12/1 year for a .com or .net domain.
I personally recommend 123-Reg.co.uk to register domain names (a UK company), as their Hosting Control Panel is free to use and you can transfer domain names to other 123-Reg users without the costs that many other registrars charge for this service.
You
should bear in mind what facilities the registrar provides for managing
your domain. Do you get access to your own domain control panel that
allows you to point to any name servers you wish (as opposed to
charging you extra for not using their hosting)? Are you the registered
holder of the domain (your name/business is named as the registrant)?
This is particularly important as a third party company registering
your domain, may enter their own details for registering
the domain, giving them ultimate control over any charges they make for
renewal and management.
Hosting Costs
With hosting, you tend to get what you pay for. Functionality, reliability,
bandwidth and your security needs may alter the pricing considerably.
For static web sites (i.e. needing little or no
scripting language requirements) using low/average bandwidth,
hosting can be obtained for around £60 - £80 per
year. You may even be able to use the
free hosting space provided from your ISP if applicable
for hosting a simple, non-dynamic web site with very few pages.
For a small dynamic or database
driven site requiring further functionality for using a database (e.g.
equivalent to ~ 20/30 static pages), somewhere in the region of £80
- £160 per year is to be expected. Extra features installed
on the server will bump the price up (e.g. having Cold Fusion, Microsoft
SQL Server, statistical packages etc. installed).
The hosting price you pay will depend of whether you are knowledgeable enough and have the time to manage the hosting yourself, or you require someone to help with general maintenance of the hosting (i.e. such things as setting up email accounts and FTP user accounts from the control panel, the setting up restricted/password protected areas of your site, liasing with the hosting company if servers need to be changed, requesting IP address changes etc.). Also, prices will generally be higher if you have a lot of visitors (so using more bandwidth) and/or a lot of larger sized files (a larger storage space needed on the server).
For high usage, large, data driven web sites (e.g. for a corporate organisation,
E-tailor, custom scripted sites), a dedicated server would usually be
the best option. You have almost full control over your site and server,
can install your own custom scripts and components at will and are
not sharing the bandwidth/processor usage with other web users. However,
a dedicated server may not be cost effective as they tend to range from
around £1100 - £2000+ per year.
Web Site Design Costs
Rough costs for a single page site with contact details, 1 or 2 images
and some text outlining your business would be in the region of £50
- £85, plus any domain registration and hosting costs
(although a single page could be hosted easily on shared hosting, reducing
the cost to a minimum).
Costs rise when the page design, navigation menus, logo and any graphics
require creating. A small business site using mostly static pages, including
the creation of a page layout template, graphics and links (between 8
and 10 pages) might be somewhere between £300 and £500,
depending on the media and content used throughout the site.
Supplying content in a digital format (text
and images) keeps the cost lower as it takes up extra time typing,
proof reading and scanning and manipulating images.
Typical Scenarios
Each web site is individual and must be tailored to the purpose intended
and as no two sites are the same, it is impossible to give a fixed
price. Listed below are typical scenarios giving some idea for the
probable expenses of setting up a new web site. Please note: The typical pricing examples given below are a ballpark figures and will vary somewhat with changes in economy and hosting availability trends.
Scenario 1 - An Internet Presence Web Site - Representing Your Business
Venture
Approximately 8 static pages, hosted on a
low cost server, might cost around £400 including
the first year's hosting and domain registration. Page design, layout
graphics and CSS styles, SEO and minor updates/changes in the first
6 months. Pages might include: about the business, contact and directions,
email contact form, product lists with images, testimonials/past work
references, achievements, affiliations and related content....
Scenario 2 - A Database Driven Small Business Site
Summing up the costs for a typical small business or product
sales site, consisting of a small content management system, database
creation and update form pages, layout images and page designs for site
pages (the database providing the equivalent around 40 pages of content
when data is input by the users), email contact forms, search engine
optimised, configured to easily be expanded at a later date should the
need arise, would be in the region of £750
- £1200 initial outlay (£100 hosting and
domain registration;
£650 - £1100 for web site creation and programming).
Regular updates can be done by members
of your staff at any time via a web browser using the CMS administration
area, by anyone with basic computer skills. All help and instruction
files are provided if required (the interface is intuitive and easy
to use), setting up of the site, testing and support is also included.
The database can be built to hold 1000 product details, or 40 dynamic
page details (content that can be edited using the CMS).
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