There is no single price for a business website in Scotland, because a site can be anything from a page you make yourself one weekend to a system that takes bookings and payments. What you can work out is which kind of site you need, and that tells you most of what you need to know before anybody quotes you.
Most small businesses end up with one of three kinds of site: one they build themselves, one a freelancer builds from a template, or one designed and built for their business. This guide explains what each one gets you and what actually moves the price.
You build it yourself
Squarespace, Wix and the rest will get you online for the cost of a subscription. If you are testing an idea, or you genuinely need one page with your phone number on it, this is the right answer and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The catch is your time. A tidy five page site is a fortnight of evenings for someone who has not done it before, and the result usually looks like the template it came from. That matters more than people expect. If a customer is choosing between you and two competitors, and all three sites look the same, the only thing left to compare on is price.
A freelancer and a template
This is the most common route and the most variable. You are paying for somebody to pick a theme, fit your content into it and get it live. Done well it is good value and plenty of businesses need nothing more.
Three things to check before you commit. Ask who owns the site when the job is finished, because some builders keep hold of the hosting and you cannot leave. Ask what happens when you need a change in six months, and get the answer in writing. And ask to see two sites they built more than a year ago, because a site that still works and still ranks is a different thing from a site that looked good on launch day.
Designed for your business
At this level nobody starts from a template. Somebody works out who your customers are and what they need to see before they get in touch, then designs around that. You get a site that looks like your business rather than a category, and the structure is built for the searches your customers actually make.
This is the kind of site we build. A shop costs more than a site that tells people what you do, because payments, stock and postage rules all sit behind it and all three need testing properly. A booking system that talks to software you already use is a bigger job again.
What actually drives the price
Pages, but not the way you think. Ten pages of the same shape cost barely more than five. Ten pages that each work differently is a different job. What costs money is the number of distinct layouts, not the page count.
Whether the design is yours. A template is a fixed cost. A design made for your business is a person’s time, and it is usually the single biggest line in a quote.
What it connects to. A contact form is straightforward. A booking system that checks live availability, takes a deposit and writes the job into the system you already use is a different scale of work.
Who writes the words. This is the one that catches people out. Most quotes assume you supply the copy. If you have never written it, that is genuinely hard and it is usually why projects stall for months.
Why the cheapest option often costs more
We see the same thing again and again. A business buys a cheap site in year one. By year two the builder has moved on, nobody can log in, the software behind it is out of date and the contact form has been quietly failing for months. In year three they pay somebody to start again, so they have paid twice and lost two years of enquiries that never arrived.
The way to avoid it is not to spend more. It is to ask better questions up front, about ownership, about what happens when it breaks, and about who is still there in a year.
The bit nobody quotes for
A website is not a thing you buy once. Software needs updating, security needs watching, and your business changes. Most of the sites we take over were fine on launch day and had simply been left alone for three years.
That is why our sites come with a monthly plan that covers hosting, updates, security, support and unlimited changes. The unlimited part is deliberate. If changes are billed by the hour, people put up with the annoyance instead of asking, and the site slowly stops matching the business.
If you already have a site
If you are replacing an old site, we bring your content across, usually with no downtime. The new one is built to be found on Google from the start rather than fixed later, and a bigger build can be done in stages so the cost is spread out.
How to budget for yours
Write down the three things a visitor must be able to do. Count how many genuinely different page layouts that needs. Be honest about whether you will write the words. A handful of layouts, no links to other systems and copy you supply puts you at the simpler end. A booking system, a shop or anything that talks to software you already run puts you at the bigger end, and it should be worth it.
We quote one fixed price after a short call rather than an hourly rate, so the number is agreed before anything starts and it does not move. You can see how we approach web design, read about web design in Glasgow, or look through our FAQ for the questions people ask next.
Weighing up a website builder? Read custom website vs Wix or Squarespace. Need more than a website? See what bespoke software costs, what an app costs and how we work.
