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Websites and the world wide web

How much does a website cost to design and build?

Because of the nature and the scope of websites it's a very difficult question to answer without drilling down into the nature of the project and what is required. There are so many variables involved in the building of a website. One analogy would be houses; You can't go into an estate agent and ask how much a house costs. You can't even ask how much a semi-detached house costs because an enormous number of factors need to be taken into consideration - its location, has it got a garden, and if so, how big is the garden? Whether it has double glazing and central heating, what the decor is like. How new is the boiler, and is it in an area prone to flooding? Once you get into specifics, then the estate agent could quite easily tell you that a house in this location, in this condition with these fixtures and fittings and a garden this size is worth X, and it's the same with a website.

What Maddison Creative web design Newcastle can do, though, is once we've had a chat about what you're looking for, we can work out how long it will all take and give you an up-front cost with the guarantee that if the project takes longer, or is more work than anticipated, then providing the scope of the work involved doesn't change (ie there are no further requests or changes to the original brief), then the cost will not escalate, so you can budget in advance of the work, safe in the knowledge that it will not escalate.

The web - what is it and how do I access it?

The World Wide Web or 'Web' for short is a network of web pages that can be accessed via a huge network of computers known as 'The Internet' (note the difference - the two work together to allow people to access online resources, but are not the same thing!). The internet allows computers to connect with each other and display content from one (a server) on your connected device.

'The Web' was born in the mid-1980s, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist then working for Cern, and was conceived as a way of sharing resources remotely via hyperlinked documents. It was launched to the public in 1991 along with the first 'browser', a program that interprets web code and presents it in a user-friendly way, allowing anyone to access any of the documents linked via 'The Web'.

To access the web and all of its bounty, you need a device capable of running a browser, a browser itself, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari and an internet connection. To view a website page, someone with all of the above needs to open their browser and type in the 'domain name' or URL (uniform resource locator) into the 'address bar' to go directly to that website, or if they don't know the URL, or to browse a number of websites relating to what they're looking for, they would navigate to a 'Search Engine', Google or Bing for example.

Search engines are programs that continually index what's available on the web, using small programs knows as 'spiders' or 'robots' to scour the web for any files they can find, reporting back on their content and other information contained in those files (webpages, images & other documents) and the search engine then records that information and uses it to categorise websites, ranking them on their relevance and quality in order to decide which sites to show you when you search for any given 'search term'.

Originally, webpages were limited in what they could do, and were simply a way of sharing information with limited interactivity - a far cry from today where they are fully immersive and an integral part of each of our lives, to the point where internet access is now considered a basic human right!

What are the advantages of making use of a website to promote and market my business online?

One advantage of promoting and marketing your business by means of a website is that you can promptly and easily make updates to your online promotional material. Unlike print marketing and advertising you can come up with a new marketing initiative in a meeting at 9am, by lunchtime it can be live and you will know whether or not it's likely to be a success by the time you go home at half five, changing or updating your offering the next morning should you wish. You can also react to market forces or opportunities in the market, being among the first movers when an opportunity presents itself. Print advertising simply wouldn't allow you to do this, the lead times being significantly greater.

It also reduces the amount of time and money you spend on outdated campaigns. Once your offer changes or is no longer available, with a print campaign all of your posters and flyers that you've painstakingly had produced at great expense need to go in the bin, with great cost to you and a significant cost to the environment. With a website, you simply get in touch with your webmaser/web designer/website manager and they will quickly and cleanly make the change for you online, and you are ready to go with absolutely no waste. And should you have chosen to have a content managed website (CMS) it's even easier - you simply log in to your site and make the changes yourself.

I'm looking for web design - why should I invest in eCommerce?

In the United Kingdom, the eCommmerce sector is huge and growing relentlessly with growth of around 15% year-on-year. Online purchases have an average value of £78 in the UK, and over 76% of people who went online last year made some sort of purchase.

One of the most significant growth areas is eCommerce on a handheld, touchscreen devices such as a mobile phone or a tablet. Around a third of all purchases made in the UK last year were made on a mobile device, which means that if you are selling online, there is a 1 in 3 chance that if someone buys one of your products they are sitting in the park, or on the bus or waiting for their partner to get back to the car from an actual real-life shopping trip.

The advancement in technology of mobile devices and internet coverage is largely responsible for this, a significant factor being the number of eCommerce sites that are optimised for mobile and the size of mobile phone screens.

Internet advertising is also a massive growth area, with around half of the annual advertising spend in the UK spent online, a figure that is expected to again rise by another 10% by the year 2020. Given the growing number of potential customers who are turning to the web to shop, it is understandable that an ever increasing number of online businesses are devoting an ever increasing proportion of their budget to advertising online.

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