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To be able to give you an idea of design and construction costs, we would need to know.....
• Basic strategy and/or website objectives ?
• How much graphic design is required ?
• Are any special technologies needed ?
• How much content is there, and in what format ?
Basic Strategy and/or Objectives
This is required as it becomes the policy against which other decisions can be made. It also focuses the designers on your business priorities and enables us to make suggestions and enhancements that you would otherwise be unaware of.
Why is this website being built?
What are you hoping to achieve.?
Will you be able to measure the effectiveness of this website against the objectives you set.?
Try to develop something along the lines of a broad overall statements such as:
(1) "to discover and grow international markets for our product range and to expand sales to export customers"
(2) "a year from now we want to making at least ten new customer contacts per month directly from the website"
Detail whatever sub-objectives you can think of.
For example : Create a list in descending order of importance.
- Attract international customers
- Attract local domestic customers
- A reference for people to find out more about our operations
- To support advertising with detailed product information
- To attract approaches from new raw material suppliers
- To give stock availability info to preferred customers
- To enable customers and agents to order product at any time
- Attract suppliers of manufacturing equipment and spares
- To provide remote sales staff with pricing information. (Future Project)
- To create a 'knowledge base' of technical information that can be accessed and searched by staff and customers. (Future Project)
Think of the different groupings of people that you interact with in your normal business day - and think beyond just customers. Consider suppliers (stock and equipment), staff, technical service providers, agents, alliance partners and even competitors. Customers buy, but sometimes also need technical support, or access to product information that does not really need human help.
How could your website service issues that constantly cost you people and money to service.? A FAQ Section (answers to Frequently Asked Questions) could deal with having to spend hours on the phone with customers - and would also service them at 8:00pm on a Sunday when your staff cannot.!
Graphic Design : How Much is Needed ?
The creative work of developing logos and website graphics from scratch can be one of the biggest costs in the project. These costs are significantly reduced if you already have corporate identity artwork. This would normally include a logo with different formats (product packaging, letterhead, landscape and portrait) as well as sample layouts for service and product information brochures.
The website, if it's not an entirely new venture, is probably a further media extension of your organisation. If so, then it should reflect the same "look and feel" in terms of branding and corporate identity. The colours used in logos and letterheads can form the base theme colours that will be used for the graphic design.
Some customers have set ideas as to the anticipated look of their new website based on others that have taken their fancy. A brief could be along the line of : "The menu system from www.website1.com and the top of page layouts from www.website2.com would be great. Maybe we can also use the plant classification chart idea from www.plantwebsite.com for our Disease Diagnosis page."
Special Technologies : What is Required ?
For most sites, none of these technologies would be needed - but you need to confirm this.
- Does the site need to be 'searchable'.?
We might need to install s dedicated search engine application for this purpose.
- Are e-commerce functions required.?
Are you planning to make it possible for people to pay with creditcards from the site.? And, if so, would you want a shopping cart interface so that they can 'collect' goods and services (correctly priced) as they move around the site.? How many, and which, currencies would you need to cater for.?
- Do you need a CMS.?
After a few months, most websites will become quite static and content updates will only be required, perhaps, at six monthly intervals. other site might require daily updates, and some will continue to grow quite steadily with new pages and amendments being added regularly.
The more dynamic sites might require a Content management System (CMS) to enable you to upload and change the existing pages yourself without our intervention. If so, then we need to identify that fact now.
Content : How Much is there and In What Format ?
This refers to the work involved in populating the site with the initial information. Ideally it should be in digital format (such as in Word documents or some text file format). If in PDF files (and the text needs to be transferred to HTML) then we would need samples of the PDFs to determine if the binary can be extracted.
How many pages would be on the site, and how long would each be.?
Currently, the content data is in what file format.?
In conclusion . . . . .
Having read through and considered these issues, you can now return to the top of this page and give a short response to the four questions at our Contact Us for a Quotation form.
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