Website design

Many people are confused about website design, and how much it costs to get a website going. Some online promoters claim you can set one up for free, and some people advertise that they can do one for a few hundred dollars. Whilst there are some design agencies that literally charge thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. So what is the difference between these?

Basically, anyone can set up a website, and yes you can do it for free. BUT, be careful, you do get what you pay for to a certain extent. The free sites usually look, and behave like free sites. Perfect for family pics, but when doing business, it is a different story.

Free websites and hosting usually mean you will have a banner on your site that pops up. So even if you could master a great design, do you really want a pop up banner of someone else's business? Also, these free sites, usually have no service at all. If you are in business, you cannot risk this. Free sites usually mean you have a really long url to your site, for example: www.geocities.com.au/~joes plumbing/index.html. This is a definite no no for serious businesses.

Yes, you can also do it yourself and save money with a website program like Frontpage, but it will take you time and in the long run, you will not save, and still end up with a site that looks like a Frontpage site...we in the industry can spot them a mile away, again not very professional. If you want to spend time doing websites, then become a designer and leverage your learning experiences. Chances are, you'd rather spend time doing what you are good at. Do not make the mistake of spending weeks on a non professional site, when you could have earnt three times as much if that effort was put into your core business, doing what you are good at.

The sites we design are premium quality sites that design agencies would charge you $3,000 upwards. Expensive sites cost a lot because generally they take time to do, and it is a reasonably complex process. It often takes a lot of meetings between client and web designer - justification why design agencies can charge you more.

How do we offer such a good price for a professional site? Basically, we streamline the process, minimising costly time consuming meetings. You give us content, and trust us to give you a professional design that we know will make you look professional. This is our business we know what we are doing.

We are happy to have countless meetings to perfect what you exactly want, but this method will cost you more in the long run. Don't get us wrong, we are happy to do it that way and we will still be cost effective compared to design houses. However, we also like to offer an alternative to new and small businesses. Our special offer is for those who want a professional site, but can't or do not want to spend top dollars. We are confident that our designs will service most of these businesses well. It is our guarantee that you wil not end up with a site you dislike, even though we haven't had numerous, face-to-face meetings. Our designs are based on a brief you provide, so we do not envisage too many problems with giving you a design you dislike.

Savings are also achieved because we buy some of our designs, utilities, music tracks, graphics etc from external artists, which saves us time in our studio, and saves you money. For example, we could pay a photographer $1,200 a day to get "the right pic", or we could get one from our image bank for a few hundred dollars. The important thing is that the end result for you is a premium quality site minus the expense. This is what we achieve. Read the details on the left and view our sample sites. This will give you an idea of the type of sites you can expect.

The only downfall of our method is that some components of our sites may appear on other sites. We get great prices from the components we buy because the artists can resell them to others. This is exactly how image banks work. You pay for minimum for photos, but the photographer has the right to resell them to others. The chances of doubling up are rare as there are millions of images. On the rare occasion, if you do see components of our site elsewhere, and it bothers you, we will replace this component free of charge. We can exclusively buy these components from our artists, ie where they agree not to resell them to anyone else, but the price of your site will significantly increase. The choice is yours.