An £x,xxx website!

[namealot]

My old boss spent £15K just on his site logo and colour branding, for example.

15 k on a logo does that make it good then ?

I here this so many times with web sites and clients that want them they tend to fall into categories of the lazy, busy, ignorant or new most would spend more time choosing a a pen than deciding on a website…?

What you can define with budget is man hours, expenditure on hardware etc that’s about it? You can spend xxx it be fantastic you can spend xxxxxxx it be shit.

Before you think about a site do or pay for basic market research about your company, client’s, product, service, If you’re an existing firm ask you clients questions ? entering new fields look at the competition what they do and adapt the bits you like don’t etc ( yes this can make all sites have that same feeling about them) etc but for most it pays dividend
Sure some web firms will have the experience to do this for you but again doesn’t mean there any good or right for you there will be ones that don’t that could be brilliant or not… Look at there other work show friends family etc it see what they think?
You can do all this and more and it still not work but that’s the risk in business if you don’t then most I’d say prepare to be shafted….

 

[Aegean]

15 k on a logo does that make it good then ?

Not necessarily, but thats what happens when you employ an experienced branding company. Theres a lot more to a logo and branding than it just being "good".

 

[namealot]

Not necessarily, but thats what happens when you employ an experienced branding company. Theres a lot more to a logo and branding than it just being "good".

Ditto just throughing money at it (what’s the logo then love to see what makes it special ?)
Trying to define if there getting value for money, spending too little too much is near impossible without multitude of info? For poster as many others they must understand cash spent and desired outcome don't automatically go hand in hand...? E.g. Ireland .com "experienced" branding, design company’s etc lots of money spent shit site ?

 

[denchomsky]

In my experience working for an agency for big clients, and working with private clients, private clients want the world for nothing most of the time, and coporate clients will happily pay over the odds.

The reason for this is the same, neither generally understands web development, so with the private client they are unwilling to pay for something they don't understand.

And with the corporate client they are willing to pay over the odds to an agency that has proven it does understand what a coporate client needs.

 

[RobM]

As with anything in this world, if you want a professional, you have to pay an appropriate price.

(From someone fed up with bargain hunters who expect professional quality for peanuts!)

This!

I own an advertising agency amongst other things and we design websites from the ground up. If a customer wants an all original design, cms, ecommerce etc they'll be looking at 4 figures. Any less and it's simply not worth the hassle. People still need wages etc. With 7 staff it's not worth compromising price for quality. If people want to spend a couple of hundred pounds there are plenty of people building around the highly compromised and unreliable wordpress etc.
You can see our stuff at definedbranding(.)com. I'm the guy in the Cannibal Corpse t-shirt by the way
This is not advertising as we deal mainly with local clients.

 

[denchomsky]

you still have 2012 in your footer

 

[RobM]

The copyright date applies to when the site was redone - not the current date

 

[julian]

I've never heard such bollox.

I'd like to see anyone here come up with something built from the ground up better than wp, joomla etc for a 1k - that can offer the same robust, agile and futureproof solutions for peanuts, that fits the average clients reqs.

enlighten me with some examples please.., I am out of date

 

[martin-s]

Wordpress is fine for basic stuff. But there are better options for more involved websites.

 

[peter_w]

Depends if you know what you're doing with Wordpress to be honest. Everyone still seems to think of it as a blogging platform but its way beyond that now. There's not many projects that I wouldn't recommend utilised Wordpress as the foundation.

 

[denchomsky]

Depends if you know what you're doing with Wordpress to be honest. Everyone still seems to think of it as a blogging platform but its way beyond that now. There's not many projects that I wouldn't recommend utilised Wordpress as the foundation.

It is overkill for small websites that don't require a DB of archived material. There is so much extraneous code to try to cover every eventuality, most of it is not needed for a static website.

If you have web dev skills then there are alot of better options, if not then Wordpress has a fairly easy learning curve, even then I would say knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP is pretty important to get the most out of it.

 

[peter_w]

My point was more aimed at Wordpress only being suitable for "basic stuff".

Though in response, even for a simple "static" site I would often argue there's a case to be made to utilise it. Clients will be able to update content themselves as and when required, rather than having to rely on the developer. Though I suspect many agencies/developers make a a good chunk of revenue by having to support/update sites for customers.

Making a couple of calls to a Wordpress database is hardly an issue for even the cheapest of web hosts.