The four bands
Build it yourself: a subscription and your evenings. Site builders such as Squarespace and Wix charge a monthly fee, mostly under €40 a month, and give you templates. Honest value if you have more time than money and a simple story to tell. The real cost is your hours, and the common failure is not the tool: it is the site quietly never getting finished.
Roughly €500 to €2,500: the freelancer band. A template adapted to your business by someone who has done it many times. Most Irish small-business brochure sites live here, and for most of them it is the right band. What separates a good one from a bad one is rarely visible in the design: it is whether the addresses, the redirects and the basic search plumbing were done properly.
Roughly €3,000 to €10,000: the studio band. Custom design, content help, and someone project-managing the move from the old site. Right when the website is genuinely how you win work and the template look would cost you credibility. Much of the price is meetings and revisions, so the spread inside this band is about process, not pixels.
Above €10,000: the systems band. Online selling, bookings, integrations with whatever runs the back office, multiple people involved. Here you are not buying a website; you are buying software with a website on the front. Quotes in this band deserve a written specification, because the price is in the details nobody has agreed yet.
Why quotes for the same site differ by thousands
- Who writes the words. "You supply the content" and "we write it with you" can be a four-figure difference, and the second one is why some expensive sites launch on time and some cheap ones never launch.
- What happens to the old site. Moving the old pages' addresses across properly (redirects) is invisible work. Skipping it is how a redesign loses the Google standing the old site spent years earning.
- Photography. Supplied photos, stock photos, or a day with a photographer: three different quotes for the same design.
- What "includes maintenance" means. Sometimes it means hosting. Sometimes it means a plan worth €100 a month. The word is doing a lot of work; make the quote spell it out.
Four questions that expose a quote
- Do I own the domain, the site and its content outright, and can I take them elsewhere if we fall out?
- Will every address on my current site redirect to its new equivalent, page by page?
- What exactly is in the monthly fee after launch, in writing?
- If I come back with changes in month three, what does an hour of your time cost?
A provider who answers all four plainly is worth more than one who quotes €500 less and answers none of them. The expensive surprises in web design are almost never in the design.
Before you pay for a new site, examine the old one
A redesign is the most commonly mis-sold fix in this industry. Slow pages, an expired certificate, a form that swallows messages and email landing in spam are all repairs, not rebuilds, and every one of them survives a redesign that does not address it. A €79 health report measures what is actually wrong with the site you have, with the evidence beside each finding. Wellkept sells the examination, not the build, so nothing in the report steers you towards a bigger site than you need. If the verdict is that the site is sound, you have just saved a band. If it is not, you now know which quote above you are actually shopping for, and the report is your specification for the fix list.