A realistic plan for a new business web site

We outline here a typical breakdown of how a web site build project plan might look like for a new business engaging our services. Your business needs may require some or all of the services in this plan depending on what you have already done yourself, how far along the process you are and what content you have available.

Week 1 Phone Consultation – Free
(Up to 2 hours but usually shorter)
- Getting to know each other a little bit.
- Discussion about budget, timeframe and quality expectations.
- Email summary of call with loose outline proposal if appropriate.
- Explore dates and locations for face to face meeting.
Understanding your objectives and discovering if there enough synergy between us for a long term win-win partnership.

Week 2 Face to Face Meeting & Written Proposal - £150
(Meeting up to 3 hours with follow-up work of up to 10 hours.)
- Initial face to face meeting.
- Deeper understanding of your objectives, expectations and aspirations for the web site.
- Understanding your marketplace / industry sector and customers including keyword research.
- Competitors and their web sites.
- Written proposal with optional elements.
This helps us to understand the marketing space and your place in it.  Are your expectations realistic? We do some research then reflect on it over the week to reach conclusions which we present to you in the form of a report and proposal.

Week 3 (8 to 16 hours+) Defining your Brand £400 - £800+
- Positioning the new business within the marketplace.
- Your business brand values and raison d’etre.
- Your business’ Unique Selling Points (USPs).
- Developing "Strapline" which encapsulates your message.
- Design exploration – fonts, colours, style.
- All ideas encapsulated in a branding document.
Working with you to develop your brand and branding though Q&As in a second face to face meeting. Deliverable : Branding document.

Week 4 (8-16 hours+) Logo Development £400 - £800+
- Review of research, preferences, likes/dislikes
- Various mockups - 3 variations
- Selection and working up at various resolutions and potentially aspect ratios
This is a particular "how long is a piece of string" task. If you have a clear or fixed idea on logo already then that can speed things up. It's important not to get too obsessed with this task. Logo can be evolved over time. Best to keep it simple at start.

Week 5 (4-8 hours) Domain Name Sourcing £200 - £400+
Domain name choice and selection (if required)
- Research, Shortlist and selection.
- Purchase (Third party costs £12-£30 for first year if name available.)
Ideally your chosen name would be available in .com and .co.uk.

Weeks 5-9+ (24 – 64 hours or more) Web Site Build £1200 - £3200+
- Content development and/or collation.
- Hosting with Weebly or other service.  (Third Party cost from £120 per annum)
- Theme choice and page template creation.
- Page creation. Information architecture. Home, Contact, About, Services, Case Studies etc.
- Legal T&Cs, Privacy Policy – standard ones or bespoke via your solicitor.
- SEO of all pages.
- Google Analytics set up.
- Google My Business and Bing Business set up.
It's hard to put a fixed time frame and cost on this task. Our experience is that it will take longer than you think to develop the site content. It's important to get the content right and it usually takes several iterations.

How much of the content creation and page build we do vs how much you do greatly affects costs. It could end up being quite simple and you may end up doing a lot of the time consuming content creation work yourself and that will keep our costs to just the technical and design aspects of the web site build. Or you may require us to be more hands on with the content creation.

There are many additional services including:

Social Media Marketing
We can assist with setting up and running a Facebook page for your business.

Paid Advertising
We can help you set up for success in Google Adwords.

Ongoing Reporting
We can monitor and report on your web site’s performance.

Web Site Evolution
We can evolve your web site by creating and adding new content and making changes to existing content to enhance the web site’s performance.

Interested? Get in touch for an initial free telephone conversation to discuss your requirements or arrange to meet us for a fixed consultation fee of £100 for 2 hours - excluding reasonable transport costs.