Building a website for a small business: what it actually involves

Ordering a website looks straightforward at first glance, yet two quotes for the same job can differ several times over. One asks a couple of hundred euros, another several thousand. If you are not a technical person, it is hard to work out what exactly you are paying for and which quote is honest. Let us go through it step by step: what a website is made of, where projects most often stall, and which costs keep running after the site goes live.

What you are actually paying for

The price of a website is not the price of a design. A small business website usually consists of four parts and each of them takes time. The first is content and structure: how many pages there will be, what goes on each page and how a visitor moves from a service to the contact form. The second is design: how the site looks on both a computer and a phone. The third is technical delivery, where forms, maps, analytics and everything else that has to work are put in place. The fourth is upkeep, which only begins once the site is live. A large share of the price difference comes from the first and fourth parts.

• Content and structure: the list of pages, the texts, the images and what you want the visitor to do.
• Design: colours, typefaces, the layout of the front page and the mobile view.
• Technical delivery: content management, forms, speed, security certificate and analytics.
• Upkeep: updates, backups, small changes and hosting.

At DigiOP a website costs 790 € plus VAT and hosting is 0 €. The domain is paid separately to the registrar. If the site needs appointment booking, the booking system costs 19 € per month plus VAT. All prices are listed on one page so that you can compare them side by side with other quotes.

Content is the longest part of the project

Website projects most often stall over the texts. The technical side is usually finished quickly, but the site sits half done for weeks because service descriptions and photos are still with the client. This is not laziness. A business owner knows the work well, yet writing it down so that a stranger understands takes longer than it first seems. That is why it pays to start putting the content together before development begins.

• A list of services with a couple of sentences of explanation for each.
• Price information, or at least a range, for example 200 to 400 €.
• Contact details, service area and opening hours.
• Photos of completed work or of your premises, not only stock images.
• An answer to the question of what the visitor should do: call, fill in a form or book a time.

SEO is not something bolted on to a site afterwards. It starts with the structure and the texts. If every service has its own page with a clear heading and real content, then Google has something to show in the results. If all the content fits into three sentences on the front page, then even an SEO service at 379 € per month plus VAT will not catch up quickly.

The technical side goes unmentioned in quotes

A quote usually states the number of pages and the price. The technical part is left undescribed, even though a large share of the work sits there. Some of it has to be done before the site goes live, because it cannot be put right properly after the fact.

• An HTTPS certificate, which most hosting providers include in the package.
• The robots.txt setup, because during development the site is often closed to search engines and that block has to be removed before launch.
• Analytics and form tracking, which need to be working before the first visitor arrives.
• The mobile view, which is not an optional extra, since most visitors come from a phone.
• Third party scripts, such as a chat window and a cookie banner.

Google indexes a site only once it is public and robots.txt does not block it. How the file works is explained in Google's robots.txt documentation. If the block is forgotten, the site can be up for a month without anyone finding it in search.

Images and page speed

Images are the most common reason a site loads slowly. A photo taken on a phone camera can be several megabytes and if it is put straight on the site, every visitor has to download it. Visitors do not time the page, but they can tell when it is slow and they go back to the search results. Images should be cropped to the right size and compressed before they go on the site. You can check your own site speed free of charge with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool.

What happens after launch

A common misconception is that a website is a one off purchase. In reality the second part starts on launch day. The domain and hosting keep running even when nothing on the site changes. A content management system gives you the ability to change texts and images yourself, but that assumes somebody actually does it. If no new service or completed job is added during the year, the site will look exactly the same a year later as it did on opening day. At DigiOP hosting is 0 €, so no monthly invoice arrives for that, and the domain is paid to the registrar, usually once a year.

Backups and updates

A site needs updates and security fixes even when the content stays the same. Software ages and old versions are an easier target. A backup is the sort of thing you remember only once something is already broken. Before accepting a quote it is worth asking three things: who carries out updates, how often backups are made and how quickly the site can be restored after a failure.

How to compare two quotes

When two quotes differ several times over, the question is usually not the design. The cheaper quote often includes a template into which your logo and the text you send are placed. The more expensive one includes more work on content and structure. Neither is bad in itself, but you should know which one you are buying. These questions make the difference clear quickly:

• Who writes the texts and is that included in the price.
• How many pages are included and what the next page costs.
• Whether I can change texts and images myself without receiving a new invoice.
• What belongs to me: the domain, the content and the site files.
• What maintenance costs per year and what it covers.

It is also useful to look at previous work and open it on a phone. Our completed projects give an idea of how a finished site looks and how quickly it opens.

If you are not sure what your current site needs or where to start, we will go through it with you. You can request a free audit from the contact and free audit page.