I’ll preface this question by saying that it is not a web-designer wanted ad, I am just looking for advice on the current state of play with regard to websites
My research group needs a website, and I am wondering what the going rate is right now for someone to design one for me.
My requirements are pretty basic, I will need a front page that links to maybe five or six others. Most will contain information on our research; no animation or dancing BS etc. The overriding requirement is that it must look good, so it will need to be put together by someone with talent/experience in website design (ie not me). It would be put on my university department’s server. What would you expect to pay? (I am in the UK).
This is kind of like asking what does a car cost. The right answer may span a couple of orders of magnitude depending on the details. Website design is one small part of what my company does, so I rarely encourage professional people to DIY. Too many people see good website design as analogous to cutting their grass; they could easily do it themselves and only pay someone for convenience. However, a decent web designer knows a lot more than just the mechanics of HTML and will create a site that is visually appealing, ergonomically usable, and robust.
That said, the site you describe doesn’t require a lot of architecture or usability studies and should cost anywhere from free to a couple of thousand max. If you hired a professional media firm to do it, it would cost 20K+ just for the information architecture study to determine how the pages should be laid out (and this is money well spent for many sites, but probably not yours). However, you could probably do a decent job yourself with a few hours of reading and playing with one of many website creation tools.
If you’re at a university, it’s very likely that one of your students could gin up the HTML in short order at very low cost since you’re providing all the content and site architecture up front. If you were in the US, I’d recommend offering a student about $20/hour (~2.5 times minimum wage) for a maximum of five hours to transform your content into a basic website. Your budget should allow for double or triple that much time as you review the initial work and tweak. To make this work, you should sketch out a flowchart of what pages will exist and how they’ll link, provide the text content for each page, and provide a list of URLs to other websites that have color schemes and layouts you deem appropriate (so these sites can be used as a guide to the look and feel you want, but not just copied). You should also specify up front which browsers you want to support; a lot of software tools and inexperienced designers will use techniques that are only supported in IE and do not degrade nicely in other browsers, but it’s just as easy to create pages which are compatible with all modern browsers as long as you plan for that in the beginning.
