Many of a times in my freelance career I have came across clients asking the same question.

“Why does my website costs so much?”

Hence I thought it might be good for me to write about this, and hope I can address the doubts concerning the hefty price tag on a website design.

The birth of a website -  From design conceptualisation to delivering the end product

Every website goes through the same process

1. Getting the requirements ironed out.
2. Brainstorming and conceptualisation of the website design
3. Layout in a graphics program
4. Getting approval and making changes
5. Conversion from pure graphics to a functional website template
6. Doing UAT (user acceptance tests) for kinks and bugs
7. Adding in content and generate pages
8. Optimise for search engines (SEO)

You might say, “I thought creating websites is very easy. I can even do it in MSword… just click save as webpage.” Creating a user-friendly website is not as easy as one might think. A website is like a magazine, full of information yet organised. Time and effort is used to make it easy to read and navigate through.

Given the points above we can see that creating a website isn’t as simple as creating a document and save it as a webpage. One of the main factors affecting the price is the time taken on each of the steps. Getting the requirements (step 1) ironed out may take up 3-4 working days. Often a not, clients are not exactly sure of what they actually want and additional requirements may surface in the midst of production. This adds to the total time needed to complete the project and hence the increase in price.

Next in line is steps 2 and 3. Design ideas do not pop out instantaneously upon confirmation of the project. Time is needed to do market research, explore concepts, creating drafts and layouts. Given the likes and dislikes of the client, the design is further tweaked, usually this will take a few revisions.

Upon confirmation of the graphics and layout, comes the production of the website. This is the part where most clients misunderstood the level of complexity. A website is not a static piece of flyer or poster where people are distributing on the streets. There is functionality built into it and it responds to the user’s actions. Building a website is like building an experience, a relationship between the user and the information. For example, a design layout of a email form only depicts a single page, a screenshot. In building the functions for the email form, one has to think of all the possibilities and scenarios that it will generate. Like user error pages, server error pages, email confirmation page, database to capture the user info, and a “thank you for submitting” page. Only with all these pages in, the website can be considered as functional.

The more functions the requirements need, the more time is needed to create the website. And so thus the price that follows.

Welcome to littlevault.com

It’s been nearing 2 years since I register this domain name. And this is the first site design to grace it’s home page… what a disgrace. Sometimes I really do wonder what am I doing for the past 2 years, too busy with freelances and work? Bah, was hooked to games till reality pulled me back a few months ago.

So what’s with littlevault.com?

Well it’s a site for me to house my thoughts, portfolio, articles, tutorials, photos.
Currently it’s still under development stage, many of the sections are not up yet. But rest assured, they will be up soon and with tutorials on each stage’s development.