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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.

How have web technologies evolved with time?

The web is built on several technologies working together to produce the dynamic resource it has become. But what are these, and how did they come about?

The basic building block of the web is a markup language called HTML. This enables content to be presented to the user in a particular way using 'tags'. Without it the web simply couldn't function. HTML was introduced as an experimental technology in 1992, allowing web designers to build a page using text, images and a basic framework to share information to users browsing remotely from their computer.

Mosaic was the first browser to be released, and despite it being launched eons ago in web technology terms, it is still recognizable to a user of a web browser today. Opera and Internet Explorer soon followed, as did HTML2, an evolution of HTML. In a relatively short space of time HTML3 and HTML4 were introduced, and included significant input from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in order to ensure that competing interests from involved parties wouldn't compromise the technology.

HTML4 would become recognized as THE version of HTML for the next ten years because of this, the '4' was invariably dropped in favour of just 'HTML'.

Meanwhile, Javascript, Java and Flash were developed and launched to allow greater complexity in the design, animation, interactivity and functionality of websites. CSS was then introduced to separate the content of a webpage and its styling. Several other browsers followed, including Safari, Firefox and Chrome, and small updates were made in the guise of XML in the following 10 years but it wasn't until 2008 and the introduction of HTML5/CSS3 that HTML made a serious leap forward. HTML5 gave the designer and the user even more scope for dynamic, interactive client side content, running natively in the browser, Flash having been long since phased out due to its reliance on a third-party plugin.

Maddison Creative web design Newcastle were founded in 2009

Today, the main driver of technology change is the increasing number of devices that browsers use to access websites - mobile phones, tablets, touchscreen devices - all dictate how websites are built, replacing the once ubiquitous desktop browser.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how is it affected by web design?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is something that affects your website from start to finish. Every element in the construction and design of your site can have an impact on SEO, which is effectively another way of describing best-practice for websites, only the best practice guidelines were written by Search Engines, such as Google and Bing, in order to ensure only relevant websites of sufficient quality are returned when someone does a search. This ensures that only websites that have adhered to accessiblity and useability standards get the search engine performance they so keenly seek, and that those who don't won't be found, encouraging them to adopt best-practice in the process.

SEO incorporates your site's content, how it is written, whether it is written well and whether or not it relates to the search the user has just performed. It also encompasses your design and your coding, looking out for whether or not everything is tagged properly and coded in such a way that browsers can clearly determine how to render everything, and that users with special needs such as visual impairments are also having their needs met.

One downside of the need for SEO is that content written specifically to perform well for SEO isn't necessarily the easiest to read from a human perspective. This is because the more prevalent a keyword or keywords are, the more significance a search engine places on that term, which can result in copy bing little more than a long list of keywords.

A good web designer/developer will do this as they are building your site, but there is always scope for improvement and refinement, especially as technology develops and guidelines and best-practice recommendations shift with that progression.

What about good web design and Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO is the process whereby you make your site as finely tuned as possible in order to ensure that Search Engines such as Google and Bing consider your website worthy enough to show ahead of all the competition.

This involves writing the content in such a way that it relates to the words (keywords) your potential customers will be searching to find whatever it is you're doing/selling/saying. It also entails making sure that all the key elements of what makes up a good website are there and put together properly. Titles, images, framework of your site, links - they all have to be right.

This also includes things you can't see - the invisible tags that sit behind your webpage, but that do an important job nonetheless. A good web designer will do all of this as a matter of course, but there's always room for improvement, especially as time marches on, and best-practice and guidelines change and what used to be the done thing is now frowned upon.

What's the market like for eCommerce and good web design?

The eCommerce sector in the UK is huge and steadily growing. UK online sales increased by an estimated 15% last year. 77% of people who went online made a purchase, with an average order value of around £78.

Around a third of e-commerce traffic in the UK is on a handheld device. In terms of mobile traffic distribution, a third is on tablets while the remaining two thirds is on a smartphone, which is a result of the increase in size of the screens on mobile phones.

Investments in digital advertising are also on the rise. Last year they represented almost exactly half of the total advertising spend in the UK, and this is expected to climb another 10% by 2020. Given the growth of e-commerce in the UK, it is normal that more and more advertisers are choosing to dedicate a more significant part of their advertising spend to online channels.

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