Website designer?

[Hicks12]

Well im asking for friend whose set up a business and would like someone to design a website for him, he asked me to help find someone so i thought id ask here. Anyone design/create websites profesionally? hes got a budget of around £500 i think but im not sure if thats enough, i havent had to get a website designed or anything so any recommendation of companies or personal assistence is appreciated.


Thanks.

[Jay]

Depending on how many pages he wants £500 is not that much really.

[tiggerai]

For someone starting out though it's good to get in a portfolio!

I'll ask around here... see if anyone's interested.

[Hicks12]

thanks guys, wrote it in a rush so sorry if im missing some info etc. Any questions please ask, the website is for cloths as he currently sells quite a bit(so he says) and has suppliers, just needs to get a website up now to help.

[Norky]

Does he want to sell over the net then?

[360bhp]

I can do full custom ecommerce stores, with logo design.

Send me a message, and I'll send you some more info if you like.

[Bazzlad]

I'm a pro web designer, but unfortunately, if he wants E-commerce for £500 he's likely to get rubbish - remember pay rubbish, get rubbish.

This bloke tried to get me to drop my price by £200.
I declined.

He found someone who would work for that money.
He got this:

http://tinyurl.com/5gy42p

Tell him to bear that in mind!

[moogle]

I'm a pro web designer, but unfortunately, if he wants E-commerce for £500 he's likely to get rubbish - remember pay rubbish, get rubbish.

This bloke tried to get me to drop my price by £200.
I declined.

He found someone who would work for that money.
He got this:

http://tinyurl.com/5gy42p

Tell him to bear that in mind!

....Even I could do better than that and I'm a hobbyist!
I thought sites were cheap..

[Byatt]

<?php
if ($ecommerce && $budget < 2000)
  die("client is an idiot");
else
{
?>
send me a pm.
<?php
}
?>

Seriously though - what does he need doing? £500 says static content only with the faintest chance of a CMS if it's seriously simple.

[moogle]

<?php
if ($ecommerce && $budget < 2000)
  die("client is an idiot");
else
{
?>
send me a pm.
<?php
}
?>

Seriously though - what does he need doing? £500 says static content only with the faintest chance of a CMS if it's seriously simple.

Really? £500 pays for static content? Useful info guys thanks.

[Byatt]

Really? £500 pays for static content? Useful info guys thanks.

Well, it gets you quite a lot of static content, or a small amount of dynamic content.

It really depends on the client - are they coming to us with a clear idea of what they want the site to look like? How many pages are there, and how different are those pages? As soon as you start adding CMS stuff there's a risk you have to start thinking "will this client ever **** this system up, meaning they will ring us and want it fixing?", and similarly, on a larger scale, with eCommerce. The cost of ****ing up rises exponentially from static content (change some html) to dynamic (code rework) to eCommerce (major rework, grovelling, etc), thus the charge for writing code that doesn't **** up does too...

That's a very simplified view (and to be fair, Bazzlad summarised it somewhat better), but there you go...

[Whiternoise]

As has been said, it all depends on what he wants with it. A basic photoshop template could cost you under £100 - i've spent a while on ClanTemplates (they have a marketplace for this sort of stuff) so that's where the figure came from.. You're going to be paying more for the template to be sliced and put into html - or just for the html side of things.

Once you get into ecommerce and cms's then it really depends on what you want - if it's just a basic article posting thing then it could be quite cheap, but full blown with forum integration, shopping and so forth can rack up the pounds - mainly because you want it to be secure. If you're on a budget then the cheapest option might just be to get a predone cms and pay the money for someone to skin it for you.

[moogle]

Actually nevermind I'm hijacking the thread sort of, sorry Hicks!

[Hicks12]

Well he wants something for his store, its a cloths shop so basically like marks and spencers but less complicated and just cloths, basic online shop is what its ment for. Currently in contact with someone, im just trying to help him find some advice so i dont really know much in what he wants lol.

[360bhp]

I'm a pro web designer, but unfortunately, if he wants E-commerce for £500 he's likely to get rubbish - remember pay rubbish, get rubbish.

I don't fully agree about rubbish. I have seen designers pick prices at random from the top of thier head, or based on what the website will be selling. To me, it makes no difference if they are selling items with the value of pennies, or gold bars. I do agree £500 is a bit low for ecommerce though, but things but can be adjusted to suit the budget, doesn't have to be rubbish.

Hicks12.. Make sure the site is fully custom, and not just a oscommerce, or cubecart script with a fancy skin.

[Bazzlad]

I don't fully agree about rubbish. I have seen designers pick prices at random from the top of thier head, or based on what the website will be selling. To me, it makes no difference if they are selling items with the value of pennies, or gold bars. I do agree £500 is a bit low for ecommerce though, but things but can be adjusted to suit the budget, doesn't have to be rubbish.

I don't do much of backending - bit of php, bit of asp simple cms back ends etc, but front end wise £500 gets you a basic site from me - and I'm not short of customers because there are so many rubbish designers out there - I was looking for a SEO advisor for a friend's company (that's my mainstray but I don't have the time) - I saw at least 5 sites with VALID HTML buttons - that linked to W3 validation site saying the site wasn't valid - WTF!

You pay rubbish, you get rubbish - unless you're lucky and catch a skilled kid on the way up - it's happened to/for us all at some point.