How much should I pay for a website?

June 22, 2007 2:35 PM

Your a small restaurant, say ~$2M in sales/year, you want a web site, what's it worth?

You want to use the site to get people to come eat and use your catering services. Hopefully the stie will also streamline the experience of catering/private event clients by making menus and FAQ readily available. You have a logo and some pictures and want it done sooner than later. What are reasonable design and production fees?

posted by Fuzzy Dog to computers & internet (38 comments total)

Depending on your location and desired features, you're probably looking at $5k to $10k, plus ongoing maintenance.
posted by acoutu at 2:40 PM on June 22, 2007

$8-15 for domain registration and you can get a years woth of web hosting for $70-$100.

Most web hosts have a system that will automatically install many Content Management Systems (CMS) with only a few simple clicks of a mouse. (one such Feature is called Fantastico)

Once a CMS is installed, all you have to do is log in as an administrator with the password you set up and customize the content, add pictures, text and pages, even change the visual themes) and voila.

$120 and a weekend of playing around and you have a website.
posted by jlowen at 2:42 PM on June 22, 2007

Seconding jlowen, but putting it cheaper from GoDaddy.com.
posted by k8t at 2:46 PM on June 22, 2007

Responding to jlowen... yes but what would this website in a can look like? If a business owner wants the design to be an extension of their marking and branding, they need to hire a designer. Fuzzy Dog, if it is truly a brochure site with a bunch of pages of information with images, a contact form for email and custom design, that should run you $4 to $6K. Adding features will make it more.
posted by semidivine at 2:51 PM on June 22, 2007

I think ~$1500-2000 from a local designer will give you something unique and functional.
posted by milarepa at 2:51 PM on June 22, 2007

semidivine is right to a degree. If you want a really unique and polished look you will have to pay more.. As a compromise though, you can buy a more unique and customized theme for a CMS that could get you within spitting distance of real quality. Usually such custom themes can run in the $200 ballpark.

Mefi: Within spitting distance of real quality.
posted by jlowen at 3:00 PM on June 22, 2007

If you were to hire me I'd present 2 custom designs, build you a nice SEO friendly xhtml/css template out of the one you prefer, integrate it into wordpress and charge you $3500-$6000 depending on specifics (and it would be mobile phone friendly too).

I'd also throw in an email newsletter template and give you a few ideas on how to build your list (both online and with comment cards and wait staff incentives to capture emails in-store). I'd also give you a few ideas on how to split your list into different customer behavior types and what kind of content you should deliver to those segments.

I could also help you get listed on the free local directories that matter and keep you away from the ones that don't. Maybe help out a bit with a locally focused google AdWords campaign.

The website is just part of the online marketing toolkit, and of the three I've mentioned (email marketing, search marketing, website) the least important for your in my opinion.
posted by Mick at 3:06 PM on June 22, 2007

Prices vary quite a bit. Rather than speculate what something is going to cost, why not bid around? You can post your project up on eLance.com and have designers from all over the world bid for the job. Make sure you are specific about your needs, otherwise the cost can change (sometimes dramatically). Also, make sure that any designer posting a bid for you supplies a link to their portfolio.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 3:20 PM on June 22, 2007

I'm with Semidivine and Mick on the $3-$6K ballpark. Yes, you can get a CMS-driven website registered, set-up, hosted, and populated with your content for not too much at all. Will it look like ass? Probably. Don't plate your information on Chinette.

People looking at your site will often be doing so when they're in a decision-making space. They've read a review, seen or heard the name, etc. and are thinking "Where shall we go tonight? I wonder what that place is like..." The user is on the cusp of deciding whether or not to become a customer. Or they're deciding whether they trust you to handle all of the food for their event. For my money, this would not be the time to go cheap on presentation. You want to extend the experience you've designed for the front of the house into the customer's living room, and win their trust. So, spend a bit. It costs to arrive at a compelling digital expression of what is an otherwise physical brand, and it may take a few rounds of concepting, but you should definitely do it. A poorly-done site will lose you business, just as surely as a well done one will help to win it.

Cost will ultimately depend on what your local market is like (assuming you source the job locally). You might be somewhere that's overrun with starving designers willing to work cheap, or be in a town that knows the value of web services and doesn't have a hungry freelance economy. For the size of job you describe, it sounds like you'll want to find a one-person outfit, though. An actual multi-employee web design shop probably has too much overhead to consider a $5K job.
posted by mumkin at 3:30 PM on June 22, 2007

$7,000-$12,000 - for a good-looking site with a CMS with a bit of SEO thrown in.

(based on working in the industry in Toronto)
posted by avocet at 4:28 PM on June 22, 2007

Cost is also going to depend on what you need. If you have no marketing strategy or branding established, it will skew to the higher end of the range. If you also need copywriting, editing and search engine optimization, it will cost more.
posted by acoutu at 4:35 PM on June 22, 2007

I'm guessing you got a quote (or three) and balked at sticker shock.

Keep this in mind while you consider.

You can do some things on the cheap, and others....well, are turnkey.

So, if you know what you're doing, you could register a doman, get webspace, and hire talents you need (design, implementation, SEO strategies, and revisions later.) This will be the cost of the cheaper quotes mentioned here.

Then you have groups that will completely take care of you. Pay a price, review their work, and someone else takes care of all of it for you.
posted by filmgeek at 4:39 PM on June 22, 2007

What are you willing to pay?

There's probably someone out there willing to work for whatever you're offering, but beware the "you get what you pay for" effect.
posted by rhoticity at 4:57 PM on June 22, 2007

Please, please, please - make sure you look at a portfolio of their work, first, and talk to their clients. There are so many people that paid out the ass for a website, and got some bloated Flash monstrosity that was pretty much impossible to navigate.

If you have some ideas of sites you like, that will help them design a quote for you, too.
posted by Liosliath at 5:04 PM on June 22, 2007

Something to keep in mind
posted by blueplasticfish at 5:06 PM on June 22, 2007 [8 favorites has favorites]

And the strangest thing about that link blueplasticfish just posted (and it's right on the money, too) is that the absolutely worst websites out there belong to architects. They look lovely, but they're pains in the ass to navigate.
posted by watsondog at 5:14 PM on June 22, 2007

I'm starting out in webdesign and charge $15-$20/hr. CMS or no, I would say under $5,000 if this is a small site and doesn't require ordering online or daily updates.
If you wanted ordering online and/or auto-updating of the menu, then it would be much much more. Prolly $15,000 depending on what current equipment you have.
Thats MHO.
posted by jammnrose at 5:14 PM on June 22, 2007

Screw that much. If its for a local business, just info, and you can afford to have it look a bit funky, get the domain name and hosting yourself, and find a good high school student. If its just static HTML, you just need to find one with good design sense and a bit of knowledge. You should be able to find someone for a couple hundred - its basically free money for them, since they're not doing it as a career.

I'm generally against people undercutting like this, and in general, yeah, you get what you pay for, but if you're looking for a simple, nice HTML site with a logo, some photos, and some info, and its not a hugely upscale place, there's zero reason to pay for a professional designer.
posted by devilsbrigade at 5:39 PM on June 22, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Caveat to that, though - make sure you see other stuff they've done, and that they understand the image you want to get across and have ideas for how to do it. Think about posting an ad on facebook, too - the kids you want will probably have them and be watching them (I'm assuming highschool users can still see ads?).
posted by devilsbrigade at 5:42 PM on June 22, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

High school kids may not know anything about accessibility or search engine optimization, though.
posted by acoutu at 5:49 PM on June 22, 2007

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn, I've been underpricing my work. Thanks, everyone, for cluing me in to that!
posted by bitter-girl.com at 5:58 PM on June 22, 2007

If he's looking to grow his catering business then he needs more help than the average high school kid can offer.

As a small business owner, it can seem quite expensive to put together a website. I would suggest you do it in phases. Start with a reputable designer (get references and look at the portfolio, of course) and do a "phase 1" which is getting a website put together that shows off your basic information. Ideally, they would help you integrate some features using "off-the-shelf" CMS packages which would allow you or someone on your staff to update the daily menu, maybe keep a blog related to your restaurant and start you going with an email list that people can sign up on through your website.

Of course, have all the basic info there on your page, the front page! Address, map, hours, methods of payments accepted, reservations yes or no, phone, etc.

That right there is quite a bit of work -- but, not nearly as much work as allowing people to create their own menues online for catering and search for available dates to host their event. I would reserve that for phase 2 -- if you can handle all the aspects of running a website which stays current (if you plan to offer tonight's menu every night but can't get around to updating the site except maybe once a month then you'll know what you can handle) then you can put out the dough for this other part of your business.

You may decide that you don't want all that functionality and that you cannot maintain an active website. That is fine. Put all the pertinent information up there and send out a quarterly email newsletter with upcoming events and call it good.

Anyway, on costs, that really depends. I'd say, don't skimp on Phase 1, but no sense in really cutting in to your fledgline profits if it's not something that will work for your business.

Shop around and ask your friends in the biz who they recommend.
posted by amanda at 6:03 PM on June 22, 2007

fledgline = fledgling
posted by amanda at 6:04 PM on June 22, 2007

I get paid just to do SEO-friendly content all day long.

Make sure you have a clear plan or some local review site is going to trump you without any problems. To be honest, I'd not recommend a flash-based site and I could even see doing such a site using something like Wordpress and a bit of graphic design trickery. Advantages would include easy-to-update menus and a regular blog would inform visitors of specials, planned closings, etc while the site looks fresh in Google.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 6:05 PM on June 22, 2007

As a customer (but ex-person-who-put-these-sorts-of-sites-together), I couldn't care less about the "design" as long as all the info is there. I do not eat on your Web site, so I really want to see where you are, your phone number(s), your opening times, and stuff like that. Almost anyone could put together a site like that, but it pains me the amount of times I see a "nice" restaurant site that doesn't even have something as simple as the bloody opening times on it!!
posted by wackybrit at 6:35 PM on June 22, 2007

OK. Nobody shoot me. This is just a suggestion. Depending on how web savvy you are (and you don't really need to be very savvy for this. I could probably do it myself with a little coaching, and I know practically nothing) just do it yourself. Go register a domain name and pay for it. Get yourself a copy of Dreamweaver or something quite similar. I'm sure there are even less expensive decent programs out there. Then, buy yourself a web template. There are plenty of sites that do this if you google it, and you can get something at any level of fancy you want, including flash. The cheapest way to do this is to buy the rights to use the template. If you're really concerned, you could buy the unique rights -- but what are the chances that you'll have the same template as someone else in town? Template Monster is a popular site for finding templates. A quick query for restaurant reveals templates such as (music warning) this and this and this, though you can search for your exact needs. Once you have the template, just fill in the blanks with all your information. If you don't like or want something, delete it. Sure, you could hire a designer. This is a much much cheaper option, and frankly, a couple of menus, some information, and a FAQ aren't that hard to put together.
posted by theantikitty at 6:54 PM on June 22, 2007

I'm agreeing with wackybrit.

I write for a food blog and look at a lot of restaurant web pages.

Please, no stupid intro page!

Please, no music that comes on automatically.

Please, no snazzy flash graphics that are annoying.

I want to see your menu, your hours, photos of your food and restaurant, a map, and maybe some specials, coupons or interesting stuff about the history of your restaurant or the food you serve.

All you need is a 5 or 6 page site with simple navigation, like some buttons across the top or on a sidebar or something.

This is just what I think as a person who eats out often and does research on the net beforehand.
posted by Melsky at 7:25 PM on June 22, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Do not let someone build you a flash heavy site that plays a lot of music and has lots of noisemaking geegaws.
That is an incredible turn off.

A small amount of non-essential flash is OK, but if it takes more than a few seconds to download, many people will say "screw it" and go somewhere else.

I don't know that you need to spend $10,000, but that largely depends on whether you have all the text and some ideas as to what you want. If you want someone to make something up from scratch and do the copy writing, you will spend more.

You can do it yourself, and many people won't care. You'd probably be better off running your business and leaving the web designing to web designers. The problem with paying closer to $2000 is that it's going to be very hit and miss. You might end up with an excellent site, or you might end up with an ugly, flash heavy unnavigable site. One of our clients (we mainly do general IT work for small businesses, although we also do a little web design) has a site he paid over $5000 for, along with something around $100 a month for hosting and maintenance (that he will never need) and it is literally the worst site I have seen since 1996.

It's flash heavy, ugly, useless, and takes a minute to load on my 12Mbps internet connection. (Yes, it's hosted somewhere fast) It's as if the designer put some uncompressed pictures and sound into a flash template and uploaded it.

All this is to tell you to look at the person's portfolio. Simple is fine, not everything needs to look like a high art brochure, but it does need to be clear and most of all snappy.

Apparently, I also need to raise my rates by quite a lot.
posted by wierdo at 7:38 PM on June 22, 2007

The perfect restaurant site? Seriously, this is basically what you need. It doesn't need SEO, it doesn't need to be fancy, it just needs to be there.
posted by devilsbrigade at 7:38 PM on June 22, 2007

Wait. wait wait wait...wait. ~$2M in sales?

That's 2 million annual dollars from sales? I think you can afford to drop a couple K in tax refundable dollars to pay a local company to design and administer your site.

I mean I highly recommend Joomla+SEF+namecheap (namecheap>godaddy)+playing around, but, I mean, come on?
posted by TomMelee at 8:31 PM on June 22, 2007

It doesn't need SEO

To grow a catering business through a website, it most certainly does need SEO.
posted by mendel at 10:24 PM on June 22, 2007

Educate yourself at least a small amount about good design. I offered to create a website for a friend's small business for $250. She paid a local "professional" designer $500, and the interface was so, so crappy. I couldn't tell her that (I tried and she disagreed), but other people looking at the site thought it was awful.

Also, what blueplasticfish said.

You could post it on Mefi Jobs too.
posted by IndigoRain at 1:34 AM on June 23, 2007

I can't believe how many people are suggesting you should cobble something together yourself from cheap hosting and templates. I can only think they'd also have suggested avoiding hiring chefs ("You can get ready meals at the supermarket for a dollar and adjust them yourself...") and decorating the premises ("I don't care what the place looks like when I'm eating"). You don't want a flashy monstrosity, but you do need an effective marketing tool.

You need to spend an amount that's appropriate for how important the site is to your business and what features it needs. It's impossible to judge that accurately without a lot more information, but it's fairly likely to be somewhere in the $5-10,000 range for a well-designed, usable site with some content management features, produced by an experienced individual/company with a good portfolio. Definitely make sure the developer is familiar with SEO and accessibility principles, and budget a few thousand for some post-launch experiments with search engine advertising.
posted by malevolent at 2:35 AM on June 23, 2007

Speaking only as a customer, I agree with malevolent. There are people who are going to say they don't care what the site looks like, but there are people who do care. When a friend mentions a new restaurant to me, usually the first thing I do is look to see if they have a website. If I have to click through 3 Google pages to find the link among a million review sites and listing pages, and then I find a crappy looking site with the menu in unaligned text thrown all on one page, I may decide it's not worth my time.
posted by cabingirl at 8:19 AM on June 23, 2007

"I can only tink tey'd also have suggested avoiding hiring chefs ("You can get ready meals at the supermarket for a dollar and adjust them yourself...")"

Ok, huge difference between the quality of the food/location and the quality of the website, especially because food is their primary function, and the website simply isn't. People do recognize this. I'm not saying get a crappy looking site. I'm saying you don't have to get a professional site, and you're conflating the two, which is hugely wrong.

SEO is this magic little term that people throw around, and yeah, when you're dealing with a company that lives or dies by its website, its important. If, however, you have a unique name, read a little bit about it (there's plenty of literature on it), and have a decent, clean design with appropriate content and links (and a minimum of Flash) your site will end up near the top of results. Making sure places like yelp and citysearch have the URL with their listing will go a long way, too.

Whatever, though. It comes down to how much the owner wants to pay. $5-10k for a site sounds reasonable for a professional designer, so if you're that concerned, go with that. Just know you do have other options, and it isn't necessarily the end of the world.
posted by devilsbrigade at 8:58 AM on June 23, 2007

My two cents: stay away from GoDaddy, they are a designer's nightmare. ASmallOrange* is wonderful.

It all comes down to how much time you want to invest. Whatever you do, check portfolios.

*[Not an employee, just a satisfied customer/designer.]
posted by theiconoclast31 at 9:44 AM on June 23, 2007

This will be the second time I second ASmallOrange for hosting.

Thanks to ASO my long nightmare of finding a decent host is at an end.
posted by Mick at 10:20 AM on June 23, 2007

Something to think about: If you can manage a good post or two about the local food scene in your area and can get the word out to some local bloggers or online media, I bet you will absolutely rock the house in terms of search engine position and word of mouth for your restaurant and catering business.
posted by Good Brain at 11:27 PM on June 24, 2007