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How much would it cost to have a web designer build your site?

November 23rd, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

Many entrepreneurs who just ventured into online business spent thousands on expensive, unnecessarily complicated eCommerce hosting solutions and e-commerce website designers. These confused newbies thought they must over-compensate with extra money for their lack of business tools, product and marketing knowledge. Do you know the real cost of starting your e-commerce site?

confuse|ecommerce hosting solutions Typical question about building an online store:
“My name is Vincent. I have a business idea for my website. Here is the basic concept of site: Baby Name site

Parents can look up their favorite names, buy a baby name book, seek baby name consulting services, etc.
What I already have: I already have my site mapped out. I literally have an exact template laid out of precisely what I want in terms of a layout. I also have all of my content written. I don’t want a web designer to make everything for me. It’s more like, I already know what I want, and I want somebody to put my ideas into action. Hosting, domain registration, and ecommerce solutions by GoDaddy.

Products/services of the site:
-A book, which will be available for purchase at another website via a link on my site
-Consulting, which is available for purchase on my site.
-Name database, which is the most complicated service. Paying members can search for names in the database, or manually browse alphabetically or by popularity. The content isn’t made up yet.
Other features of the site:
-A blog (I can have this onsite, or link to an outside blogging site)
-A page to subscribe to a free e-newsletter
-An advice column
-Name of the Week

These would require updating quite often (weekly) but if it’s just a content or even an HTML update, I could do it. I don’t need a designer to be doing maintenance for me every week. Overall I plan for it to be between 20 to 30 pages (I counted 22). I have already started designing the page, but I don’t think I have the skills to do it all. I was looking up designers near me and they want 500 for a 4 page, static, templated page. To me, what I want is not worth that much because I have already designed my own layout of what I want, provided my own content and images, etc, I just want somebody to make it. I don’t have a lot of money to spend on graphic design. So, how much should I be looking to spend on something like this?”

genius|ecommerce hosting solutions Expert Advice:

The above could be your business. Great ideas with poor implementation will not go far. To move in the right direction, it is important that you understand the difference between the two major e-commerce hosting solutions:

1. The Hosted Shopping Cart Solution, at the minimum will have these benefits built-in into their shopping cart system to allow you to create a store with easy-to-use tools, use simple ecommerce wizard to add products and accept credit, debit, and PayPal payments. You also can easily process and ship orders and measure success with reporting capabilities.

Recommended Hosting Solution: BigCommerce. You can set up a store straight away with ease. Any BigCommerce review will say good things about this service. You can try BigCommerce for free.

You do not need a programmer, webmaster, web developer or anybody else to start and run this type of solution. It is easy and fast, but not with drawbacks. However, this solution is more than enough for most storefront needs. If you are not building the next Zappos or Amazon, then you should be fine.

2. The DIY eCommerce Solution on the other hand will require you to choose, configure and integrate the separate components. You choose a shopping cart software, create store design, install shipping and payment modules, install traffic/reporting analysis tools, integrate all these components and much more. You may need a team of skilled IT professionals to get a store set up. It can be the more robust option as you can choose the best ecommerce tools to use. Self-hosted or this DIY option is a powerful option if you are technically inclined in building your online store or have special requirements that cannot be met by the above. We recommend you try BigCommerce first before trying any other option.

If you want to go the DIY path, you need to think of the costs of all the components. A web designing service fee for a website depends on the number of the web pages your website will have. The more web pages to be created the more expensive it will be. However, you can save more when you outsource your project at elance or odesk instead of going to your local development company.

Recommended Web Host for your DIY E-commerce Website

myhosting|ecommerce hosting solutionsIf you are going the self-hosted path, then we suggest you get a VPS from a company like MyHosting. If you want to try using a shared hosting first, we still recommend you go with myHosting. Another good shared hosting service is Fatcowfatcow review.

If you are looking for a company with very few negative comments, then try search for MyHosting review to see what we mean. MyHosting also give free domain name, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited add-on domains, friendly Site builder and much more for such a low monthly price. You can get MyHosting for only $4.84/month.

MyHosting Coupons: If you need a VPS instead of just ecommerce hosting solutions, you can enter the Coupon Code below during checkout to get Up to 6 months FREE on VPS plans at MyHosting. If you want both Windows (Microsoft) and Linux Platform in one hosting plan, including unlimited diskspace and bandwidth, with 20 Exchange-based Email – then the coupon below takes $10 off the Premium myHosting plan.

We hope our answer about ecommerce hosting solutions has helped to solve your problem. If not, you can try alternative answers below. If you have a better answer, please leave a comment in the box below.

  1. Ezrune.com
    March 15th, 2011 at 20:11 | #1

    Highschooler here with advice: Go with an amateur that knows what they’re doing – They’ll often do it for cheap and they don’t have a good footing to argue higher prices – I’m doing one that is worth near $400 but I’m only charging $150 – 200 because I have no past work to show.

    If you came to me with the website plans, technically all I have to do is set up a database, create a search and listings page, set up ecommerce and use wordpress for the blog and advice column. However tying these together could be pretty tricky.

    If it were me, I’d charge around $500-600 for the whole site because:

    - Having to tie in multiple scripts (ecommerce, wordpress) can lead to a lot of time trying to get the two to work.

    - Creating a fast and simple search page

    - Creating an admin center for you to enter in new names

    - Creating a login system (may tie in with wordpress)

    Of course there’s still probably some wordpress plugins out there to help with this, and the designer/developer may make a plugin himself.

    *On a side note – Your website that you want is mainly a job for a web developer (someone who does the back-end code of websites). If you find a designer that can do it all (generally a freelance web designer can do this) then kudos.

  2. π
    March 15th, 2011 at 20:11 | #2

    Web designers don’t get many people to contact them, so they try to make a lot of money for each site. Your best bet is to get a college or high school student who has shown that they can do CSS/HTML work (someone interested in going into web design/scripting professionally). They would probably be happy to do it for cheaper so that they can build their resume’s.

  3. Nick John
    March 15th, 2011 at 20:11 | #3

    i think you are registering more websites… its profitable for to get a registering site of your own .. and register your site with good blogs,forums, cms etc.. like me.. i get the site in http://www.goresellers.com/

  4. Sandeep Kaur
    March 15th, 2011 at 20:11 | #4

    Web Design to get more attractive & Best web design for your business. If you use good technique at the time of creating website u got easily top 10 position in Google & it will help to generate revenue for your online web business. so don’t hesitate to contact with us Call 1300782023 for Free

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