I think for some guys choosing a webdesigner etc can be difficult as many of us dont know what to look for in a designer untill we have made the mistake of paying x amount.
When I first looked into getting a website a few years back I was trying to get it for as close to free as possible. Obviously, we need to be willing to pay something to get value for money (and I understabd this better now). You do in many cases get what you pay for afterall.
Im glad you mentioned some prices as although I personally know what I would like to spend and what my limits would be, it makes you wonder what you should be spending sometimes when prices can vary so much. I have heard of some tradesmen paying closer to a grand for a website that appears to have some pretty
standard features.
Personaly I have never paid more than £150 for a site (I have had to pay a little for changes a few times though). I have put in alot of hours advertising on directories and stuff though to try and get it noticed and ranking better and Im now paying for SEO on a monthly basis. I guess that if you can get the ranking and management for a reasonable fixed price then it may be wrth putting out a little more initialy.
I used to charge £2,000 for a tradesmen type website that was optimised and I took the money up front, and got a lot of business in too. You get serious tradesmen when you charge such an amount. And you can spend time on making sure it ranks well. I used to charge £5,000 for an ecommerce site, and £10,000 for an optimised one. Did a few of those a year too. I charged the higher end of the scale to make sure I only ever got serious companies that did a lot of business offline but just never thought about a website.
On the flipside, I used to often do websites for free for companies who had an offline business but no online presence, and then take a cut of the website earnings. So it wasnt always about the direct cash.
Don't think I could charge that these days though.
I would never pay monthly for SEO though. You'd initially have a website built, it would rank, and then only from time to time would you need to pay the SEO guy to go over it and help with more key phrases or help get newer products and / or services ranked well.
Out of interest Dan, say we managed to get a designer who offered the service you mention at £400-600. How long should we expect to wait before the site needed an overhall to keep it performing well?
Can a site be designed and put together to last or is there a time when maintenance, improvement and seo etc are required?
This can be hard to gauge really. A tradesmen type website situation; you'd have the content sent to the web firm so it's a case of copy and pasting really, that would take an hour. The website depending on how it is being built should be anything between a few hours (for a content management system type website) to a week (for a website hand coded in html like this one -
Staffordshire VW Specialist | Staffordshire's Volkswagen Specialist | BVR Automotive) - it's the optimising that you're waiting for and it is out of the web designers hands.
You launch a website, you link to it, you optimise it's pages, you write a few articles and post them on other websites. Takes a day tops. Then it'll take a week or two for Google to find it and index it. Then wherever the website ranks, will need improving on. So that's when you start needing so spend time changing things, improving things, adding more pages etc.
Ideally the customer should be given access to update it often as a website that hasn't been updated for some time will eventually not rank so well. Google likes fresh content, unique content, and content that's updated often. Hence why forums rank so well.
