It’s one of the questions our designers get asked the most.

You guessed it, how long will it take for you to build our brand-new website?

And there’s good reason for that. Every year, we work with many start-up companies. These businesses might be construction companies, solicitors, or, let’s say, a new dental practice opening somewhere in the fantastic city of Cardiff.

Now, even though all of these businesses are different because they are start-up companies, the directors often go through something similar. That is finding offices, having them redecorated, hiring staff, finding suppliers, and yes, hiring that local web designer or digital marketing agency so the business can sing from the rooftops about what services or products it is selling.

So this is where we step in. Often, we are told that doors open on a new shop or business venture in just over a month, and there’s a rush to get a new website designed. This is where we can step in. With highly talented web designers and some of the best SEO experts in Cardiff working for us, we are well-placed to start promoting your business for you.

So, in this article, we thought it would be an excellent idea, to elaborate on some of the factors that determine how long it takes our web designers to build a brilliant, brand new website for your business:

So, let’s jump into it: how long does it take to build a brand-new website?

Content marketing

So, what’s one of the slowest parts of the web design process?

Are you designing the responsive mobile version of the website?

Are you designing the homepage and using JavaScript?

Is it adding the video that automatically loads on the homepage?

Nope. From our experience as highly experienced web designers, it’s the writing of the content marketing. Even if the website is, say, ten pages in total, when you add up the word count on every page, the cookie policy, the legal page, and the main page content, you’re looking at sometimes in excess of 4,000 words even on a small brochure website.

And because the company director often has one hundred and one things going on at that time, when they first launch the company, they often don’t have the time to write the content marketing.

But do not worry; this is also where we can help.

We can add the text to your WordPress website for an additional fee.

So, how many pages does your business require?

Sometimes, we can design some PHP WordPress CMS websites from start to finish in less than four weeks for a client. However, on the other hand, a large business selling thousands of product lines may need an e-commerce website. Now, this might have well over one hundred pages, which means it will keep our web developers busy for at least six months.

The reason for this is:

The client may want us to:

–            Add on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

–            Add pictures

–            Add text

–            Alter the wireframes

–            To add functionality, such as contact us boxes

–            So, the more pages, generally the longer it will take our web developers, SEO consultants, web designers and managers to work on the website

How much coding time is needed?

If we are coding a website, say using HTML5 or Javascript, the website will be really complicated because, let’s say it’s an e-commerce website with 100 pages, and the customer wants the ability to sort whether items are in stock by low to high prices and also by brand. All of this requires a lot of coding.

So, when a business in Cardiff approaches us to get a new website designed and built, we have to work out how much coding time is needed. How much functionality the client wants- for example something that may seem simple, as sorting items by whether they are in stock or not, is not that simple from web design perspective. There’s often a lot of coding that’s needed, so if we are coding using HTML5 or Javascript, it will take us a lot of time and increase the web design cost.

How many web design/marketing companies are involved?

Sometimes, a business in Cardiff will want to hire one company to improve the search engine optimisation, a separate web design firm, or another company to manage the business’s social media.

So, there’s a lot of separate companies involved, there’s a lot of input from separate companies, all working to complete the website, this can slow the web design process down sometimes a lot. That’s simply because often one company will be waiting on the other, a web design company may well be waiting on a copywriter. The social media company may well be waiting on the copywriter to publish a piece of content marketing so that they can promote on say the businesses Facebook page.

Branding

Sometimes, the company does not have any brand guidelines created. Often, they need to create a company logo, know which font to use, and create a colour scheme for the business.

Then, our web developers will know which hex codes to use when designing the website. Also the company logo can then be added to the website. Then, the same font can be used on, say, the business website, the company business cards, as well as also say on letterheads.

So, we need a website designed, but where should we start in terms of planning?

So, you need to think of your brand-new company website a bit like how you would plan to build a brand-new structure.

When planning a new building, you often hire an architect to design it and draw up a set of plans. Those plans will be used throughout the construction of the structure.

This is the same for your website; you need to create what is called a “site map.”

Now, if you have a brochure website designed for solicitors or a business offering a service, we recommend getting your team around a whiteboard.

Then just begin to scketch out the pages which are needed.

You will begin to see, in the layout for main service pages, that you need an about page, a cookie policy page, and a page for your company terms and conditions.

And then you can start to think, well have we left anything out?

A staff member might say, “Well, we were thinking of expanding our range of services. Shall we add those pages now?” So, sitting down with your team and brainstorming how you want your new website to be designed will help you think about how you want the site map to look.

The site map will help your web developers.

Whether your hiring a freelancer working from home, or a huge, national web design agency, what’s for sure is a site map, provided right at the start, will allow them offer you a much more accurate costing for how much it will cost to get that website designed.

This is a really good idea because sometimes a business, let’s say one located in Cardiff Bay, might get a quote from a web designer, and they say that for that 7-page brochure website to be designed, we would estimate it would be 2k.

Then, once the web design process gets underway, you might start to require new pages, because you see that you have forgotten you want extra pages, such as meet the team, company history page, and also pages which expand into allowing to talk more more your staff, and the skills they have.

A 10-page website may initially be what you think you need, but as the meeting progresses with your web developers, you soon see that you need more pages added, and the web design cost may double or even triple.

So, this is why it’s a good idea to get that whiteboard out, create a site map, get your staff to say around bean bags, and ask them if they require more pages.

Do you require a website to be designed and built here in Wales?

We work with a lot of Welsh businesses every single year. From garden room companies to solicitors, we design unique websites.

Here’s why so many companies, hire us to be their web designers:

–            We build websites fast

–            We can also help improve your company’s organic SEO

–            We are WordPress experts

–            We have been building WordPress websites for over 10 years

How much does a new website cost for you to build?

We can design an amazing, well-designed website. Our prices start from just £950.00. There are other web design packages available. Most websites we build cost £ 2k. Larger websites, such as a new e-commerce website, will cost more.

How much does your website hosting cost?

So, we are quite different from some other Cardiff web developers. The reason is that here at W&P, we often offer the first year of website hosting for absolutely free. This is a massive saving for some businesses because other companies might charge between £40 per month and £70 per month for fast website hosting.

If you get a website designed by us, for say £950.00 and there’s free website hosting, then this is a massive saving for the customer.

Can help to improve our companies SEO once the website has been designed?

Yes, we can. SEO takes a considerable amount of time, depending on how much competition your business faces. For example, it’s much more straightforward to get a local dentist on the first page of Google organic results than getting a car insurance company on page 1 of Google.co.uk nationally.

So if you face, say, ten competitors who are investing in SEO, then it’s much simpler to get that business on page 1 when compared to, let’s say, a car insurance business, which is up against thousands of companies.

So, our monthly fee for our SEO services is dependent on how much competition your business faces.

Do you design WordPress websites, if so how long do these take to build?

So, the vast majority of the websites our web designers build in Cardiff are WordPress website.

We think WordPress is the bee’s knees. It’s an amazing CMS, and that’s why you have thousands of web design agencies that specialise in and build WordPress websites. They know that it’s a really good CMS, and many company directors insist on using WordPress because it’s widely used globally, has been around a long time, and has proven itself as a brilliant content management system.

So, we would say most of the new brochure websites that our designers design every week, whether for a construction business or a solicitor, let’s say, use WordPress. Often, the company also hires us to manage hosting to improve the company’s search engine optimisation.