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Web Design Services

Websites can come in all shapes and sizes. What they cost and how long they take to make varies from project to project depending on the functionality required. For example, you might need a website that can take bookings, or an e-commerce website that supports dropshipping, then this is going to factor into your website design quote. Making a website look good is only one piece of the puzzle. Our talented team of web designers specialise in understanding your vision and bringing it to life.

Our web designers treat each project with the care and individuality it deserves, but to make things simpler, we’ve provided a breakdown of what we do, how we do it and what it could cost

Web Development Roadmap

Splitting our process into phases allows us to streamline the website development process. This in turn saves you both time and money, as well as making the process as simple as possible on the clients end.

Discovery.

During the first stage, our web designers to plan and inform the following stages of the project. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Identifying target demographics
  • Understanding the tasks users will carry out on the website
  • Researching the scope of the website
  • Mapping pages and structure
  • Initial SEO review

Prototyping.

Our talented team of web designers will work closely with you to create concept designs that bring your vision to life. The concept designs we create at this stage will include responsive web design for mobile and tablets, as well as some basic functionality. The aim of this phase is to give you a visual understanding of the core design ideas as well saving you time and money in making major last minute changes.

Design & Development.

Using the information gathered from the prior phases, our team will begin designing and developing the finalised concept into a fully functional website.
We begin by initially creating the homepage. Once it is signed off, our team will use the homepage as the design basis for the remaining pages on the website. Communication is extremely important during this stage in order to pinpoint any revisions required and ensure that the website fits the needs of the client.
Following the completion of the design, our web designers will begin work on ensuring that the elements such as animations, forms, e-commerce, and so on, are fully functional.
Upon completion of this phase, the website will be ready for content population.

QA & Launch

Once the client is happy with the website, we move on to the testing phase. We carry out a thorough quality assessment on every website we develop. This involves, but is not limited to, ensuring that the site is fully responsive across all device types, along with testing the functional elements of the website. For clients within the EU, we will ensure that the necessary privacy and cookie requirements are in place.
Quality assurance is arguably one of the most important stages of web development. Websites can be designed to look good, whether it's through a web design agency, freelancer, or website builder. However, ensuring that website meets high standards takes careful testing.
Upon completion of this phase, the website is ready to go live, with a 4 week grace period should any issues arise or changes be required.

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Pricing

Simple

£400-1000

Brochure style website

Ideal for individuals and startups

Around 1-5 pages

Suited for a simple web presence

Start your simple website

Small Business

£1000-2000

Ideal for SME's

Unique brand appropriate websites

Uses a scalable CMS

Extra functionality including: Blogs, newsletter integration, etc.

Start your small business

Interactive

£1500-2500

All features of small business site

Ideal for unique luxury brands

Researched and optimised user journey

Interactive and animated elements including: reacting elements, parallax, video elements, etc.

Aims to visually impress the user and increase engagement

Start an interactive website

E-Commerce

£2000-4000

All features of small business site

Supports a wide range of payment options including:
Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, Stripe, etc.

Variety of shipping methods

Built on WooCommerce or Shopify for scalability

Small to large businesses (10,000+ products)

Start your E-Commerce Project

Enterprise

£10,000-20,000

All features of small business & interactive sites

Ideal for enterprises

Highly optimised websites

Extensive brand guidelines and high ambitions

Often requires multi-language websites

Start your enterprise website

Associated Costs

  • Image & Video licenses – Grabbing images or videos from anywhere online isn’t always possible due to licensing issues. Due to this, it’s recommended to arrange your own photography, or purchase and license stock media. Stock images and videos can become pricey (up to £300). Fortunately, there are some excellent subscription services, such as Adobe Stock or Envato Elements. Another great resource is Unsplash, an online platform for free, high quality stock images.
  • Copywriting – As one of the key differentiators between a good site and a bad site, copywriting is essential in SEO, generating user engagement and making your business stand out. If time or creativity are an issue, we recommend hiring a freelancer or agency who can write copy for you. As a general rule of thumb, a 5 page website should have a minimum of 2,500 words of SEO focused content. Product descriptions can vary in word count based on the type and features of the product.
  • Plugin licenses – In some cases, plugins are recommended due to their ease compared to coding a function, and in some instances they are necessary for certain functionalities on your website, for example, payment processors and courier integration into your website.
  • Payment processing fees – If your website has an e-commerce aspect, then you’ll need a payment processor. In most cases, we recommend Stripe and Paypal. Stripe, for example, take a commission of 1.4% + £0.20 (2.9% + £0.20 for non-European cards) from all payments processed. This means that if someone purchases a product for £100, you will receive £98.40, with the remaining £1.60 going to Stripe.
  • Domain – Securing a domain is usually the first step in building your website. Domains usually cost between £5-20 annually and are registered for a minimum term of one year. High-end domains can retail for thousands. One of our clients recently purchased their domain for around £3,000. Top level domains (.com instead of .co.uk) tend to cost more than region specific domains. It’s worth pointing out that when purchasing a domain, beware of companies trying to upsell you unnecessary extras.
  • SSL Certificate – An SSL security certificate allows your web address to begin with https, which is now a requirement for all website. Without it, you will receive browser security warnings and find it difficult to rank on any search engine. SSL Certificates cost around £40 annually.
  • Hosting – Before people can access your website, you’ll need to host it on a server. Hosting fees can vary depending on the resources your website requires to operate smoothly, from as little as £2 a month to £500. Generally speaking, you should expect to pay £10-20 per month. Premium services can be upwards of £150 a month.
  • Search Engine Optimisation – SEO goes hand in hand with web development. It forms the backbone of marketing and ranking your site on various search engines, such as Google and Bing or running ads on Google and Facebook. Without a well-planned and catered SEO strategy, you’re website could miss out on a significant amount of traffic.
  • Newsletters and emails – Most marketing mail providers have plans for both marketing emails (newsletters, product announcements, etc.) and transactional emails. While your website can be configured to send transactional email without the use of a service like Mailchimp, they are highly recommended due to their simple drag and drop email builders.
  • Plugins – Some high-end plug-ins, such as AffiliateWP, come with a monthly fee.
  • Maintenance and after-care packages – If you require tech support or continous updates to your website, this should be taken into consideration.
  • Social media marketing – If you don’t have time to manage your social media, you might need the assistance of a freelancer or agency to handle your social media. Prices can vary depending on if content needs to be created, frequency of posting, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions

A CMS is a Content Management System. They are used in place of a custom back-end, which can easily cost upwards of £10,000. CMS platforms such as WordPress, Shopify and Magento allow you to create, edit, manage and publish content to your website easily thanks to their user-friendly interfaces. Creating a blog post or replacing an image is as simple inserting the required content and publishing it. Due to their low technical understanding requirements, a CMS can save you money as it will allow your copywriters to easily add new content or update existing content without the need for a web developer.

The majority of our client websites are built on WordPress. We chose WordPress for two specific reasons:

 

  1. It allows us to hand over the reigns to our clients once their bespoke website is complete and lets them have full control over the content, saving them a significant amount of money after completion.
  2. WordPress has the largest array of plugins available for increased functionality (note: some plugins, especially high-end plugins, often require licenses and/or subscriptions)

WordPress powers almost 40% of the internet and accounts for almost 65% of CMS based websites. It can be used for almost anything, from simple blogs such The Official Star Wars Blogs, to more advanced sites from major corporations such as BBC America, Mercedes-Benz, and many more. WordPress also features WooCommerce, an e-commerce plugin developed by the developers of WordPress.

When deciding on the CMS you’d like to use, it’s important to consider factors such as scalability, ease of use, security, costs and the experience of your web designers with the selected CMS. While WordPress is free, without a web developer, you could end up paying a significant amount more than expected by relying on plugins. Shopify on the other hand has a monthly fee, as well as fees for most of it’s plugins, but it also offers a simpler back-end than WordPress. Magento is another powerful CMS and one that’s growing rapidly due to it’s excellent e-commerce features.

Drag-and-drop website builders like Elementor or WPBakery are template-based tools that allow someone with minimal coding knowledge to build a website on their own. They are great entry-level tools, however, they come at the cost of the final result being generic and lacking a bespoke design. Let’s have a look at some of the pros and cons:

Pros:

  • They’re cheap
  • They cut developers and freelancers out of the equation and give you direct access to create changes on your website
  • Most website builders are fairly high quality these days
  • They’re relatively easy to use

Cons:

  • They can be very time consuming. Ultimately this means that you’ll need to decide whether to focus your attention to your business or your website.
  • Website builders still rely on you knowing some HTML and CSS (and occasionally PHP and Javascript). Without some basic knowledge in those coding languages, you can find yourself stuck strictly within the template with little room for making something more unique.
  • There are often fees such as monthly subscriptions required to use the builders. Taking Elementor as an example, its best features are hidden behind Elementor Pro.
  • Page builders don’t let you optimise SEO. This means that once you complete your site, you’ll still face the challenge of bringing traffic and ranking on Google.

Many web designers will say that you should either use page builders or ignore them completely. At Pixelbloc, we like to do things a little different. We believe that once your site is complete, it is something that belongs to you and you shouldn’t be locked out of making your own alterations should you desire it. As a result, we ensure all our websites are built to be compatible with a page builder and will provide you with a lifetime license so you don’t need to worry about additional fees.

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