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Many website design houses fail to explain to their customers what costs they will incur, when they will incur them and what they actually mean. Initial setup fees are flashed up on screens giving the impression of fantastic deals only to leave confusing invoices for unexpected amounts landing on your desk a month later. At NeonHorizon we have no secrets and make every effort to explain in advance what your costs are and when and why you will be getting them.
To get an idea of how much your website will cost you feel free to give us a call or if you prefer take a look through the details below which explain the one-off charges and ongoing fees you will encounter.
To allow your website to be viewed by the widest possible audience you need to have it hosted on servers which are fast, reliable and secure. These servers must have solid, high speed connections to the Internet and be secured in air conditioned buildings with 24 hour a day, 365 days a year monitoring. The hosting fee you pay is essentially a rental charge for the space and bandwidth your website takes up on these servers and a contribution towards their upkeep.
Unlike many website design houses, NeonHorizon runs its own servers; this means even though we offer you prime location UK hosting we can still serve your website live to the world for as little as £85+VAT a year! Please feel free to check out the prices of our various hosting packages. (To give you a guideline the average small business website will sit quite happily on our £85+VAT per year Business 500 Package.)
To allow the public access to your website you will need a domain name. This is essentially the name given to your webserver to be used in your website and email addresses, for example: google.com and google.co.uk are domain names.
You can have as many domain names as you feel appropriate and point them to the same website, and indeed many of our customers buy both the .co.uk and .com variants to avoid confusion. You can even present your site in different ways depending on what domain is used!
The actual costs of domains are relatively cheap, NeonHorizon can supply .co.uk domains for £13+VAT (for 2 years) and most other domains (such as .com) for £16+VAT per year. For more infomation on domain prices please check out our domain name fees.
If you wish to take credit card payments on your website you will need a payment gateway provider. This is basically a company which interfaces between your website and your bank to process transactions on your behalf, similar to the companies which supply the card machines you use in shops but in the virtual world.
Depending on the type of transactions you process there are many options such as Paypal, Google Checkout, Worldpay, etc. At NeonHorizon (like many of the UK banks) we recommend Sage Pay. With top quality security and an excellent fixed rate of £20.90 per month (for up to 1000 transactions a quarter) Sage Pay are one of the few companies that don't charge a percentage or transaction fee on individual payments. This means you can be rest assured its only going to cost you only £20.90 a month.
The cost of website modifications can sometimes be prohibitively expensive - and in the case of pre-packaged websites often impossible. However because at NeonHorizon we design your website from scratch we know how it works inside out. This means we can quickly and efficiently impliment almost any modifications you ask for no matter what they are whilst also keeping the costs low.
Many companies offer pre-packaged off the shelf websites for a fixed fee but they often end up with compromises. They are never quite what you want, lack personal support and often leave you with no way to expand into other areas. Once that happens you are left with a choice between paying for expensive modifications or scrapping your site completely and starting again. If you have an extensive product range starting again can be an extremely tedious task costing you valuable time. At NeonHorizon we custom design every website from scratch making sure you get exactly what you want and making sure you don't pay for anything you don't need.
The cost of your website's design is dependant on what your website will contain and what it will do. For example a simple site which just displays a little bit about your company, what it does and where to find it would obviously cost considerably less than a website where the customer could customise and buy t-shirts to their own designs.
At NeonHorizon we work with you to establish exactly what would work best for your company leading to a fully optimised end result. This way we can meet your requirements precisely and you won't have to pay for anything you don't need.
It is for this reason that the cost of the design is usually decided after initial discussions lead to an understanding of what the websites content will be; however many people ask us for figures up front so as a general guidline we state that a simple site with a few pages describing your company and its contact details will usually cost around £500.
One of the things you will undoubtedly wish to include on your website is images. If you already have a collection of images which you own the copyright for (or can obtain permission to use) this will give you a head start and reduce your costs considerably; otherwise you will have to source them from elsewhere.
As well as having its own in-house photographer to work with products, NeonHorizon also works closely with a wide variety of graphic designers which can give your website that extra edge. We can also advise you on the costs associated with purchasing stock photography such as the images available on websites like Flickr and iStockPhoto.
Often website designers will pass on to you various server setup fees which you were previously unaware of. At NeonHorizon we manage our own servers so we don't incur any of these charges. Also, should you require any specialist functionality such as forums, mailing lists, bulleten boards, etc, the cost will be included in our basic website design fees with no hidden extras.
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