How Much Should It Cost ?
The cost of maintaining a web site can be divided into four areas:
- initial development
- annual domain name registration and hosting
- maintenance
- enhancements
Lets look at each of these areas, starting with the smallest.
Domain Name and Hosting
The domain name is the web site address, for example www.mybusiness.ie, and a small annual charge has to be paid to keep it valid. This varies depending on the ending, .com sites being cheapest at just a few euros. A .ie address is currently around €50 but there are two advantages. Firstly it is easier to establish your ownership of a .ie address. Secondly your site will have more chance of appearing in the Irish Only sites of a search engine.
Hosting is also an annual cost and is effectively a rent paid to somebody to have your site files on their computer, served to browsers by their web server. Charges vary greatly from a few tens of euros to many hundreds. For the top prices you can expect comprehensive guarantees on things like up-time, server bandwidth and security. For most SME's hosting should cost no more than a couple of hundred euros.
Initial Development
This is the principle initial cost. When you buy a web site - apart from the domain name - you are mostly paying for the time devoted to develop it. Like any other service, then, you get what you pay for and the price will be calculated according to the amount of work required to implement the design and functionality specified.
Brochure Sites
The quickest, cheapest sites are known as brochure sites. A very simple, static brochure site, designed from scratch, will take about a week to create, test and release. Such a site would be suitable for a sole trader and could cost as little as €500 including the first year's domain name registration and hosting. However, the provision of bespoke media, Flash animation and size can all increase this cost. For this kind of site a designer will do a good job.
More Advanced Brochure Sites
Many static sites, however, have code to provide some functionality. For instance a sole trader may require some limited ecommerce provision on their site. Whilst the inclusion of a few PayPal buttons is a simple task they are made much more useful with code to calculate totals, carriage and reductions based on quantity. Code can also be used to verify data on forms, play sounds and send emails. For such additions to a static site you need a developer who understands the scripting languages used. A site of this kind will typically take at least two weeks to complete and will cost over a thousand euros.
Web Applications
These sites use a database to store and retrieve data and so content is dynamic. Programming database access is a skilled job and you should never entrust this kind of work to a designer. Using a template system, a designer might be tempted to offer web applications, usually CMS sites. They will be relying on development software to produce the database code for them without actually understanding what they have created. The software doesn't always get it right, the site will not be coded for your particular needs and it will go wrong; you will then have to go to a developer to fix the problem.
Registering a domain name, assigning it to a host, configuring a template-based website builder and supplying the customer with a user name and password is about an hours work for a qualified developer. If this is the right route for you make sure that's all you're paying for.
scideas do not use templates but we do offer a very simple CMS system that allows limited text and image editing by the owner of what is essentially still a brochure site. This kind of site is intended for sole traders or small organisations who need only make simple changes but need to make them frequently. There is a demo of this kind of site here but you will need a user account. Please use the enquiry form if you would like to try it out. scideas offers these sites from €1200 but again the final cost depends upon what else is required.
Most SME's will require a fully interactive web application that can source, store and manipulate customer data as well as providing data to customers. Do not expect to pay less than €2000 for this kind of facility.This may seem a lot but by the time the developer has imagined a design, aquired and manipulated any digital media, invoked the design using markup language, added the content, programmed the database calls and implemented any other functionality, tested it, got it signed off by the customer and released it around a month will have elapsed. Even at the minimum wage four weeks work is a good €1200; developers are highly qualified and experienced and don't expect to work for the minimum wage.
Maintenance
Like all IT projects, web sites can fail to function for an almost infinite number of technical reasons. Sometimes these will be nothing to do with your site itself and may be nothing that your developer can do anything about; perhaps problems with the hosting server. However, especially with a database-driven web appplication bugs may manifest at any time. scideas will fix free of charge any faults occuring due to incorrect initial coding, however long after the site creation they might occur. For other kinds of problem, however, there are two possibilities for making provision.
- you can pay an annual charge which covers you for troubeshooting problems
- you can pay an hourly rate when problems arise
Like all insurance you might pay and never have to claim but bear in mind that hourly rates for programmers are significant. You can see our current hourly rate on the terms and conditions page.
Enhancements
Enhancements or upgrades are material changes to the design, content or functionallity of a site. Again there are two options. You can pay annually for changes likely to be needed during a year; this charge would depend on the nature of the site and upon the likely changes necessary. Alternatively you can receive a quote for the new work on the same terms as for the original project.
Content Management Systems
CMS can avoid ongoing costs to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the type of CMS chosen. Obviously a CMS will not avoid provision for technical support but it can certainly avoid annual costs for making content changes and may also allow limited design changes to be made. Some CMS systems are actually site building software and so also allow you to make limited enhancements. Such systems can seem extremely cheap because you are essentially avoiding the cost of a designer or a developer. Remember that you are also avoiding their expertise.
