Website build advice needed - Thanks

[johhn]

Hi And thanks for reading this thread.

I have hired a company to build me a website, they took £300 from me stating this would be the cost of building the website.
Sadly, they returned saying they wanted £3000 a year for maintanence and 10% of the business that goes through the website.

I refused and they left without returning my £300.

A similar thing happened from another web designer.

Can you please tell me if you have used anyone to build you a website, and if you have got a fair deal from them, someone who keeps his word
and is open in dealings.

Many thanks,

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hi And thanks for reading this thread.

I have hired a company to build me a website, they took £300 from me stating this would be the cost of building the website.
Sadly, they returned saying they wanted £3000 a year for maintanence and 10% of the business that goes through the website.

I refused and they left without returning my £300.

A similar thing happened from another web designer.

Can you please tell me if you have used anyone to build you a website, and if you have got a fair deal from them, someone who keeps his word
and is open in dealings.

Many thanks,

What kind of website do you need? For basic websites nowadays most places you host the domain have a tool to build your own website, it’s very simple and takes about 30 minutes. You have to pay a subscription for the lifetime of the website but it’s pretty minimal.

 

[debiruman665]

£300 is the price a freelancer gives who don't pay tax and probably just a student or someone abroad.

£2k is about the average you would pay from a company that has a developer and graphic designer working on the project. You would expect carte blanche with this deal providing you express your wishes upfront.

£3000 a year maintenance is a scam.

bespoke websites are a misnomer and if someone IS making you a bespoke website for cheap you can expect terrible early 2000s Dreamweaver tier quality.

I assume you didn't have a sales contract or anything in place?

source: I am a web developer, who has worked freelance, for a design studio and now works on corporate projects.

Could you provide what you are looking for and I can give you an in-depth appraisal of the ball-park price.

 

[johhn]

Thanks for the replies.

Just had a spot of much-needed good luck. I spoke to an in-law who knows how to build websites but he does not know how to put them up onto the net.
If i were to get him to put the website together, what should i do next, how do i get the website out there for people to see.

Spydertracks, can you please supply more information on what you said. Sorry, i know nothing about websites, you lost me when you said " host the domain ". By domain do you mean the website and is host the place / organisation that lets you use their servers to display the website.

 

[ubuysa]

I find the idea that someone has the skills to build a decent, modern and eye-catching website and yet doesn't know how or where to host it, worrying to say the least....

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[Rakk]

I find the idea that someone has the skills to build a decent, modern and eye-catching website and yet doesn't know how or where to host it, worrying to say the least....

Well not really, I'm part of a dev team and we're working on a website, but its the IT dept who have set up all the hosting and all that malarky, I've never had to actually set up the hosting for myself (I'm sure I could Google it, but well, I've never been bothered to as I haven't needed to )

 

[johhn]

Thanks!
Just spoke to my in-law again and he is saying he knows how to build the website but does not know how to link it up to accept payments.
How is this done, how does a customer click on a link and it allows him/her to pay for an item. Do i need to approach the banks?
Thanks

 

[Rakk]

Thanks!
Just spoke to my in-law again and he is saying he knows how to build the website but does not know how to link it up to accept payments.
How is this done, how does a customer click on a link and it allows him/her to pay for an item. Do i need to approach the banks?
Thanks

Whilst we may have people on theses forums who know that kinda of stuff, these forums are mostly for helping people designing and maintaining their PCSpecialist PCs and laptops, so you might find you get more answers at a website that is dedicated to webdesign and web technologies - I find stackoverflow turns up one many of my searches for dev problems.
I'm not saying you won't get any answers here, but you might not.
Personally its not something I've ever dealt with.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Thanks!
Just spoke to my in-law again and he is saying he knows how to build the website but does not know how to link it up to accept payments.
How is this done, how does a customer click on a link and it allows him/her to pay for an item. Do i need to approach the banks?
Thanks

This is pretty advanced e-commerce stuff, it’s not the kind of thing you can teach on a forum, more the kind of thing you do a course in at a university.

 

[debiruman665]

This is pretty advanced e-commerce stuff, it’s not the kind of thing you can teach on a forum, more the kind of thing you do a course at a university.

I can confirm University does not teach anything even close to anything this "real world".

Setting up hosting you can go down two routes.

Shared hosting or dedicated hosting.

Shared hosting will be more user-friendly as they will give you a convenient control panel and its more akin to just upload and go (providing the website is written in PHP). The downside of this is that the server has multiple occupancies and something that affects 1 will affect the rest.

For exactly the same price you can get a dedicated server but you will need to install everything you need to run the server on top of a Linux operating system which is something even most professional web designers will not be able to do as this is traditionally a systems/IT department task.

If you want the most pain-free process, get a WordPress website and set it up to use PayPal for payments. Just get rid of any fancy ideas or unique features because implementing them on WordPress will usually cause more pain and money that it would have been if you had just gotten the website designed for the purpose. Wordpress websites can be pretty decent but will require a pretty experienced developer to make it do things it wasn't always intended to do. I highly advise you if you go down the WordPress route not to dig yourself into plugin hell by believing that you can just install plugins for all the things you need because more often than not it'll just cause a lot of headaches and security concerns. The best plugins are usually the ones you pay for so the cost-benefit doesn't always apply.

https://www.neweratech.com/ <--- this is an example of the most recent website I worked on which is WordPress based. It took 3 months to finish and the combined work of 4 salaried employees with different skillsets to pull off: Developer, User interface Developer, Graphic Designer, Quality Assurance Tester.

The blog and news section was completely built from scratch, most of the rest of it was built using Divi (https://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/) cant know for sure what the overall cost was but at least £10k but less than £20k as I don't know everyone else's salaries who was involved.

Hosting should be in the range of £5 to £15 a month with the lower end being the barebones linux setup and the £15 being the convenient shared tenancy server.

Unfortunately with websites its very hard to get a good deal, the cheap people will absolutely suck due to lack of real coding ability and the good people will charge you through the nose for a lot of overpriced searach engine optimisation.

DONT BUY SEO!!!! Hire a writer to do your website content if you are not able to do it yourself and you'll hit 80% of the major SEO hit points without paying some tech guy thousands for some invisible Voodoo he'll never explain and you'll never understand.