Web designer needed

[steveroberts 10]

Its very expensive to have a web designer.

 

Define expensive please?

[steveroberts 10]

No. read the text at the top of the section:

 

Announcement

PLEASE READ: No Advertising/touting for business/asking for quotes/advertising jobs available

[jamiemini 10]

Hi all..

try

 

http://www.hydracreative.com/

 

Local web design company, extremely good at what they do xx

[Marx 10]

Hi all..

try

 

http://www.hydracreative.com/

 

Local web design company, extremely good at what they do xx

 

How do you know this?

[SheffGirl26 10]

I can definitely recommend http://www.fosterandscott.com - they've done so much for me and are so friendly and approachable

[Bectorious 10]

Hi for those of you looking for reasonably priced quality web design I can highly recommend Savage Design and Marketing, he's Sheffield based and has done some great work for us.

[lantyzhang 10]

Try http://rumandraisin.co Rum & Raisin

It's a web design and creative company offering promotional resources to startups and local businesses. They do 5 pages website for just £400

[Havanaclub 10]

The thread is 10 months old. I presume they no longer need a recommendation.

 

As for web design, I my humble opinion, you get what you pay for. I have seen many sub £200 offers on the net.

 

Web Design is one area where there is a high chance if you buy cheap, you will buy twice. There are a lot of great web designers in Sheffield and there are also a lot of charlatans.

 

I've heard stories of people asking for, but not having a contact form added to their site, presumably because a web designer doesn't know any PHP. Worse still I have seen sites where email addresses are added in plain HTML, ripe and ready for the spam bots to destroy it.

 

The cases where adverts offer a very cheap web design package are usually CMS (content management systems) installs with a template. To be honest, if using joomla or wordpress the result will be a decent functional site. And you can customise them for the future with addons / pugins etc. The problem (again in my opinion) is the compromise on the look and the time involved in getting it exactly as you want it.

 

Don't get me wrong, you can get a joomla site to look exactly as you like, but the drawback is the man hours involved. Using an off-the-shelf template is fine but customising it can take up resources.

 

The biggest issue with using a cheap sub £200 site is that the version of the CMS used will be out of date and possibly vulnerable to attack in maybe 2 - 3 years if not updated. And updating it will probably not be worth the cost.

 

A good way around the design vs CMS rigidity, is to use a CMS that allows any HTML / CSS responsive front end. The most famous example is ExpressionEngine, but at $299 (£190) for each site just for the CMS licence it's not cheap. Add to that someone to configure EE + the design work and install, your site will likely be over £600 for a simple site, and if it's cheaper, be cautious.

 

Open source alternatives are MODX, Concrete5 7 or Processwire. You can basically use any website design with these, although you will need a fair amount of skill and experience to fully get to grips with them.

 

Many websites evolve over time, so my advice would be to form a relationship with a good designer and choose wisely.

 

Of course if you don't want to update any content ever, you don't need a CMS. You can get a static HTML.

 

Businesses should however plan for the future, because the site that works for today may not be right for tomorrow. Take time to meet a web designer and discuss what you need.