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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.

Websites and the World Wide Web - what are they?

The Web, or World Wide Web (www) is a series of linked (by hyperlinks) documents that can be accessed via the internet.

The web and internet are often confused but are actually two different things - the web is the network of documents that is hosted on the internet, which is a giant network of computers that can communicate with each other. The web as we know it came about in the late eighties, an invention of British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, then an employee of Cern in Switzerland. The first browser was made available to the public a couple of years later, allowing anyone in the world to access 'The Web'.

To access the internet, a user requires a computer, an internet connection and a program known as a browser, which allows your computer to interpret web resources. Viewing a webpage requires the user to type in a 'Domain name' or URL into a browser to go directly to any given site, or navigate to a Search engine. Search engines constantly crawl the web for any document they are able to access and record content from each of those pages, ranking them by how relevant and suitable they are to the user searching, based on what they're searching for. Originally, websites were only able to display information with limited functionality, but as the technology has grown, so has the capability of the web and websites to interact with users and to query any number of data sources, resulting in the web being the necessity in each of our lives it is today.

Could you imagine going a day without checking your social media accounts, making a purchase from one of the millions and millions of online shopping sites, or managing your daily admin via an email account or online banking? I certainly couldn't!

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.

How do I proactively promote my website online?

There are an ever increasing number of ways to promote your business online, some free and some have a cost, but when running a business it's important to explore every avenue. Methods of promoting your business for free include:

Website SEO Optimize your website so that it will readily be picked up by search Engines such as Google and Bing. This is by far the most effective way of promoting your business online, it is free and it has the largest reach...if done well!
Social Media Marketing Use your social channels and communities to push your business to your peers. You can include share and like buttons from most of the social media providers which removes any obstacles between a happy customer on your site and them recommending you to their peers. Many social media sites allow you to pull content from their sites and display said content on your site. This is a great way of keeping your customers abreast of updates in real-time, whilst also keeping your site content fresh.
Reciprocal links Get as many sites as you can to link to your site, this will not only drive traffic but it will also be recognized as a positive by search engines, boosting your ranking.

Paid for options include:

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising Create an ad that will appear at the top of a search engine results page or on an affiliates' website that you only pay for (a pre-agreed price) when a user is interested by your offering and clicks on your ad. No clicks, no cost.
Facebook ads & Twitter cards This is highly targetable, which means you can define exactly who you want to see your ads based on their interests, their location and a range of other criteria.
Email campaigns Email marketing technology is used by 82% of B2B and B2C companies. Can also be free, depending on your distribution method. Directly communicate with your client base or distribution list with a beautifully designed email. A wide range of reporting tools available, allowing you to see how your email (and different parts of your email) has performed. Can contain dynamic content, can be fully automated and can feature triggered elements.

Can you update and develop my existing website, built by someone else?

Yes, not only can we build you a website from scratch, but we can also work with what you already have to increase performance, update any branding you might have, or bring the technology up to speed. Essentially we can give it a new lease of life!

How do I find out more about Multimedia content and web design?

It has been suggested in a survey recently that multimedia content on a webpage holds a client's attention for more than twice the duration of regular written content. In an age where the main aim of a website is to keep a visitor interested for long enough to draw them into your proposition, this could play a key part in your online success.

Four times as many users of the world wide web would prefer to watch a video than read an article about any given subject, and that is being fuelled by the technology. By the beginning of next year it is presumed that almost three quarters of internet traffic will be stremaing video content. Web users are becoming much more selective about how they would like their content delivered and they are being given a vast amount of choice.

As a result of the advancement in internet connectivity (both tethered and mobile) and that devices are sufficiently powerful to be able to integrate with that connectivity and the transfer of files that that will allow, it's possible for live and other media to be streamed even when the user is on a boat, at the top of a hill, in church, wherever! This gives website content managers and web designers the chance to deliver content in ever more engaging and immersive methods - Live streaming of events, gaming, animation, 360 media, HD video, the list goes on and on.

Not only can Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle help you promote any existing multimedia you may already have - perhaps from a tv commercial or offline event - online, but we can also create truly engaging interactive multimedia to wow visitors to your website.

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