Once you get a list of web design quotes, choosing the best quote is easy if you understand what you want. If you want a simple informational website, perhaps with basic e-commerce and no tricky interactive features, you should look for a web site design company that specialises in small business website packages.
If you want a web site that addresses complicated business problems, connects to your existing databases or customer service systems, or offers e-commerce that's more than point, click, and buy, you will want to find a website design company who work with your business as a consultant.
There are many aspects of a web design project. When asking for and comparing web design quotes, it is best to be specific about what you want. This way, there are no surprise costs half-way through the project.
A web design quote might address any of the following:
- Billing and Payments
- Blogs
- Booking Systems (Rooms, appointments etc)
- Donations
- Dynamic Photo Galleries
- eCommerce
- Forums
- Help Desk / Bug Reporting
- Interactive Map
- Member/User Management
- Newsletter Subscriptions
- Polls
- Ratings and Reviews
- Social Networking Profiles
- Video Player
- Website Monitoring and Analytics
- Interface Design
- Form Design
- Database Design
- Web Hosting
- Domain Names
The first step in choosing a web site design company is conducting a phone interview. Here are some questions to ask. (If you're looking for a freelancer, almost all of these still apply.)
- What are your strengths as a site development company?
- Do you understand my business and customers? (It's not the end of the world if they're unfamiliar with your industry, but they should be eager to learn.)
- Do you handle design, development, hosting, and e-commerce? (Ask only about those you're interested in, of course.)
- Will you do the work, or outsource it to others?
- Can you help us with content creation or ideas?
- Will you test the site in various browsers? Which? (A site that works fine in one browser may break in another.)
- Can your developers connect the site to our customer database/inventory tracking software/sales software?
- Will we be able to update the site content ourselves?
- Do you do site hosting? What kind of guarantees do you offer?
- How long have you been in business? Can you provide some sample sites for me to look at? (Be wary if you may hear the answer that "most of the sites we've worked on are intranets, not available to the public." Any company deserving of your business should have at least a few sites to show you.)
- What kind of support do you offer if our site breaks or needs emergency updates?
In addition to looking at sample web sites, you should also check a design company's references. Talking to their other clients can give you the good picture of what it's like to work with a particular web site design company. Get at least three, and ask them specific questions:
- Did the firm meet deadlines?
- Were they flexible?
- What aspects of their work were particularly strong?
- What areas were not quite up to your expectations?
- Did they help you plan and organize the web site?
- Did they set and meet realistic goals for your company?
- Would you work with this company again?
Armed with the right questions not only will you get the information you need when evaluating design quotes, you will also appear savvy which will mean the designers will respect you. Mutual respect and with lots of communication will lead to good prices and smooth projects.
When working with web designers it is easy to get lost in all the jargon. For example:
Designer: "Would you like your quotation to include an CMS quote or do you want XHTML compatibility?"
Customer: "Umm... yes?"
The more you know about what you want, the better the end product is going to be and the better deal you are going to get. So let's have a look at the six major types of websites and their typical features.
1. Static Website
Pros: Cheap to build
Cons: Expensive to maintain
Used by: Start ups and small service based businesses
A static website is the most common website for small businesses. The word 'static' refers to way the information on a web page is loaded. The best way to explain this is to compare a 'static' photo gallery with a 'dynamic' photo gallery.
A static photo gallery has the gallery photos inserted into the web page. Click to see an example of a static photo gallery. When the website owner wants to add photos to this gallery, they will need to employ the skills of a web programmer because the photos are part of the code. They are loaded from inside the web page.
A dynamic photo gallery has it's photos stored in a database and loads the files from the database and into the web page. Click to see an example of a dynamic photo gallery. When the website owner wants to add photos to this gallery, all they need to do is upload the photos to the database using a web interface. This makes updating the gallery much easier.
Example Static Websites:
Get static website quotes at Design Quotes
2. eCommerce Website
Pros: Sell products online and take payments online
Cons: Time consuming and expensive to set up
Used by: Retailers
eCommerce has quickly become the most popular type of website. With the wild success of eBay and Amazon, more and more businesses are looking for ways to sell their products online. The main factors that make a website an eCommerce website is not just that it sells products, but that it provides a special administrator's area where the website owner can add new products at any time. Much like the dynamic photo gallery, an eCommerce website is a dynamic product gallery.
Example eCommerce Websites:
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3. Flash Website
Pros: Looks fantastic
Cons: Slow load times and can negatively affect search engine rankings
Used by: Fashion industry, web application, web games
Flash websites use a special kind of graphics by Adobe. Flash allows designers to be very creative without worrying about the limitations of technology. Flash allows for lots of animation and interactive elements. Fashion catalogues often use Flash so that there is an added level of glitz. One of the main criticisms of using Flash is that the text in your website cannot easily be read by search engines such as Google. This means that a flash website is much less likely to rank highly in search results.
Example Flash Websites:
Get Flash website quotes at Design Quotes
4. Content Management System Website
Pros: Article and news management
Cons: Difficult to set up, often hard to learn to use
Used by: News portals, article websites, review websites
A Content Managment System (CMS) is a website which focuses on the authoring, editing and publishing of website articles and news. The articles in a CMS are stored in a database and are displayed in the website the same way photos from a dynamic photo gallery are. The advantage is that a CMS can allow many users (editors, authors, admins etc) to update the websites content through the website itself. This means that a web programmer does not need to be employed every time an article is added. Another feature of many CMS platforms is plugins. Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your website. For example, you could install a dynamic photo gallery plugin in your CMS, giving you both articles and photos.
Example CMS Websites:
Get CMS quotes at Design Quotes
5. Blog Website
Pros: Simplistic article and news management
Cons: Not as flexible as a CMS
Used by: Individuals with an opinion
A blog is a recent type of website. It is a simplified CMS that allows everyday users to post their thoughts and opinions as often as they like. Blogs are more and more often being used to manage articles as well. Blogs are often seen as part of a corporate site because it gives a friendly voice to the company.
Example Blog Websites:
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6. Social Network Website
Pros: Allows groups of people to interact, provides lots of advertising space
Cons: Expensive to set up, hard to attract a user base
A social network is the most recent website phenomenon. A social network is like a community of blogs, email and games all rolled into one. Social network websites are few and far between because the success of a social network depends on having a large community of users. However more and more organisations are beginning to create their own small niche social network websites.
Example Social Network Websites:
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