What Are the Most Expensive Web Designs in the World?
Designing a great website design for your business plays an important role in online success. Whether you’re a small, one-person business or a company employing hundreds of people with a global reach, getting a good return on your investment is important.
The simple truth is that opting for a poor web design can cost your business a lot more than you have paid for the actual site.
Your website forms the spine of your marketing activity, however much you also intend to spend on social media, pay per click advertising and other approaches. In most cases, everything leads back to your website, so you need to ensure the design is up to scratch.
Several factors may increase or decrease the cost of not only designing but running and maintaining your site. For example, a service website like an accountant or legal firm is generally a lot less complicated to design than an online retail store that sells hundreds of products.
Which Web Designs are Most Expensive?
The most expensive websites are generally large corporate ones and their design and maintenance can run into millions of pounds. They employ top of the range design and marketing teams who command huge fees.
One of the biggest sites in the world is the BBC’s online portal. It stretches to many hundreds, if not thousands of pages and that’s not including their iPlayer platform. According to the Radio Times, the budget for online provision for the BBC was £214 million in 2017/18.
Even for a site that is largely run by volunteers, such as Wikipedia, costs an estimated $25 million a year, most of which is achieved through donations.
In 2014 Marks and Spencer reportedly paid 150 Million for their latest web creation.
When it comes to web design, large corporations from Apple to Tesco invest millions to create just the right image with exceptional content that is designed to deliver strong returns. What it comes down to is building an online portal that delivers the needs of a business, whether they are selling products or services or have some other purpose.
What Affects the Cost of a Web Design?
For small to medium-sized businesses, web design and getting your business up and ready online can cost anywhere between a few hundred pounds and several thousand.
One of the key factors is whether you opt for a bespoke design or use a template. While the latter is much less expensive, it can present problems in tailoring the site to your specific needs, it can cause issues with things like download speeds and will have limited opportunity for customisation.
1. Size
The number of pages you want to include on your website will make a significant difference to the final cost of your design. Put simply, a site that has just a home page, an about us page and a list of services will cost significantly less than a 100-page ecommerce site.
A university website, for instance, will have hundreds of pages depending on the range of courses they offer. This presents enormous challenges when designing navigation. E-commerce sites can be even more complex, requiring pages to be categorized so that people can find what they are looking for. A three-page website for a local builder, on the other hand, requires little in the way of structure and planning.
2. Performance and Speed
The time it takes for your site to download on someone’s device is critical. Too long and it can leave your visitor frustrated and clicking the back button. If there are issues with your site’s performance, it can cost you revenue – nearly 50% of people say they go elsewhere if they are not satisfied with a website.
This is an issue you very often get with templates as they tend to contain too much code or have underlying problems that are not readily identifiable from the page design. A bespoke site, designed for your exact needs will cost more but it will deliver a better return on investment over time and much faster download speeds.
3. Quality Assets
From images to video, your brand design and the layout of the pages on your site, you need to focus on quality. While stock images are often available online for next to nothing, you may have to create your catalogue that more closely meets your needs – this is especially true, for example, if you run a boutique-style store.
Professionally photography or logo design will certainly add to the cost of your new site but they can help you stand out from the crowd and build a more distinctive online brand.
4. Security
You can get a free SSL certificate with encryption for your website but for sites that sell products or have higher security needs then it’s best to pay for it. What type of certificate you opt for will depend a lot on what your website is and how much trust you need to build with customers.
5. Content
Creating content for your site that is optimised for searches and brings more converting customers or clients to your digital door is critical. Many business owners make the mistake of creating this themselves – if you are a good writer, it can be the best option. Making use of a professional content writer, however, can not only improve traffic to your site but build trust with potential customers.
6. Optimisation and Responsive Design
Optimising is not just about the content you produce. How well your site performs can be influenced by a range of different design factors.
Being responsive is also key and something templates don’t always do that well. Responsiveness is how your web design appears on different devices. Whether your visitor is viewing your pages on their mobile, tablet or desktop computer the design needs to be attractive and easy to navigate.
7. Plug-Ins and Additional Design Elements
Plug-ins are essentially bits of software that can be added to your site. These are often free but have premium versions that you need to pay for. Depending on what you need for your website, you can end up adding several hundred pounds to the cost of your design
8. Web Hosting
While it’s not part of the actual design process, web hosting can add a significant amount to the cost of your new website.
There are different types of hosting. Shared hosting is the cheapest and can cost as little as a few pounds a month but isn’t great for handling huge volumes of traffic. Dedicated hosting, on the other hand, gives you your own secure space with much more computing power. It does, however, cost quite a bit more.
Understanding what contributes to the cost of your web design can help you better make decisions when it comes to finding the right solutions for your needs and keeping that budget under control. In the end, the most expensive web designs in the world are the ones that don’t perform well and negatively impact the user’s experience and cost your business money – getting it right is critical to success.