How we price a website project Part 2

Design & Dynamic Web Sites

Always something in progress…

It’s very important to establish reference points when entering a design phase for any website project. Attention should always be paid to what design trends are emerging, as users appreciate not having to ‘figure out’ a web site once they arrive on it.

We develop site layouts from client supplied material, print design, business cards and letterheads, even from rough sketches. We also develop original designs based on client feedback and supplied examples to use as a guide.

One of the benefits of using dynamic website software, is that the web site ‘lives’ on the hosting server and stores page content in a server database. The design and layout of the site is separate from the text & image content and navigation structure of the site.

When it comes time to incorporate an updated logo or company identity colors, the site text and image content stays constant while the container around them is changed.

A downside of a database driven site is that the templates tend to put the same types of content in the same location on every page. This means that, say you have a menu bar at the side of your page content. If you would like that particular menu to not appear there, someplace else on the page, or not at all, you would need to alter the display template or code for that particular page or all pages using that layout to do that.

So, in this scenario, when it comes time for us to price your Home, About, Contact etc pages we need to get a sense of the content and if any additional layout may be required. The cost for pages is partly included in the basic template logo/identity/colors cost.

We haven’t yet done a site where every single page of a dynamic web site required a different page template, but we have come close and there’s always a first time!