Websites and E-Commerce
The quote is not the cost. What decides what a website costs you is how much of it was built from scratch, and how much of that needed to be.
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Tell us what has to be built
Development work arrives in four shapes. Which one you are in decides the approach, and it is worth settling before anyone quotes.
Custom build
The product, the pricing logic or the way work moves through the business is the thing that has to be expressed, and no platform expresses it without a fight. This is the smallest group and the one where custom development earns its cost.
Platform with custom parts
A content platform handles ninety percent of it and two features do not exist. Building only those two is usually the right answer, and it is the answer most often skipped because it is less interesting to quote than a rebuild.
Rebuild for maintainability
Every edit needs a developer, an integration was added by someone who left, and the reason each decision was made is not written anywhere. The work here is mostly removing things.
Extend what exists
A new service line, a system to connect, an audience the structure was never built for. Often cheaper than anyone expects, and worth checking before commissioning a replacement.
Two websites can look the same on launch day and cost completely different amounts to change a year later. What separates them is not the design and it is rarely the platform. It is how much of the site is bespoke.
Every bespoke part is a thing only its author fully understands. That is fine while the author is available and expensive the moment they are not, because the next person has to read the code before they can quote the change. Standard parts are the opposite: dull, documented, and replaceable by anyone.
So the useful question is not custom against template. It is which parts genuinely need to be built, and which should be boring on purpose. A booking flow that is central to how the business earns is worth building. A team page that was built from scratch because the developer preferred it is a maintenance cost with no return.
That decision is invisible in a proposal. Two quotes for the same site can differ by a factor of three and neither will say which parts are bespoke, which is why we write it down before anything is built and why the architecture decision is a milestone rather than an assumption.
If what you are choosing is a supplier rather than an approach, web design answers that question directly. If people will log in and see different things, you are describing a platform, and web portal development is scoped differently. Where the site has to sell, e-commerce owns that decision. Being found is a build decision rather than a later project, which is why SEO runs alongside development rather than after it, and the full set is under our services.
| What it is good at | What it costs you later | |
|---|---|---|
| A platform and a theme | Live quickly, cheap to run, and any competent person can edit it. Genuinely the right answer for a site whose job is to explain and convert. | The ceiling. The first requirement the theme does not support is either abandoned or worked around, and workarounds are what later gets described as technical debt. |
| A platform with custom parts | The dull ninety percent stays standard and supportable, and the parts that matter are built properly. Usually the best value of the four. | It depends on someone drawing the line honestly. Drawn badly it becomes a custom build wearing a platform's name, with the running costs of both. |
| A headless build | Content stays editable while the front end is built as an application. Strong when speed and presentation matter and the content team must stay independent. | Two systems to keep alive instead of one. Worth it when the front end genuinely needs to be an application, and an expensive habit when it does not. |
| A fully custom build | Nothing is a compromise. Correct when the product is the site. | Everything is yours to maintain, including the parts a platform would have maintained for free. The highest cost to build and the highest cost to keep. |
| Where Web Designer Factory sits | We decide where the line falls before anything is built, write it into the scope, and tell you when the cheaper row is the right one for you. | Nothing is locked to us. You own the code and the decisions are recorded, so the next person can read why rather than guess. |
Before any code
What is being built, what it costs and what you get, in writing. The custom-against-standard line is drawn here and named, rather than discovered in the invoice.
Milestone one
Which platform, which parts are bespoke, what connects to what, and why each choice was made. The reasoning is the deliverable as much as the decision is.
Milestone two
The parts nobody has built before come first, while there is still room to change the approach. The predictable work is scheduled after the unpredictable work has been proven.
30 days of support
You own the code, the domain and the hosting. Handover covers how it is put together and why, so the next developer is not starting from a reading exercise.
There is no fixed price list for this work, because cost depends on how much of the build is bespoke rather than configured. We scope it after a conversation about what the site has to do and which parts genuinely need to be custom.
Book a scoping callWhat moves the number: how much is designed rather than configured, how much content is written rather than migrated, and how many systems the site has to talk to. We put a scope in writing before quoting anything.
For most businesses a platform with two or three custom parts is the right answer, and a fully custom build is not. The test is whether the thing that makes the business work can be expressed on the platform. If it can, building it again from scratch buys nothing you keep.
The proportion of it that is bespoke. Every custom part has to be read before it can be modified, and the person reading it is rarely the person who wrote it. Sites that stay cheap to change are mostly standard with a few deliberate exceptions.
It depends on how much is bespoke, how many systems have to connect, and whether content is written or moved. We write a scope before quoting a number, so the estimate describes work that was actually specified rather than a guess with a margin on it.
Yes, and it is part of the build rather than a phase afterwards. Structure, speed and crawlability are development decisions, and retrofitting them costs more than building them in.
Yes. The code, the domain, the hosting and the architecture decisions are yours from day one, with no lock-in and no dependency on us to make a change.
Then extending it is usually cheaper than replacing it, and we will say so. A replacement is worth it when the structure is the constraint, not when the design is dated.
What exists today, what it has to do, and what it has to connect to. Our team replies with a written scope.
Reviewed by clients on Google and Clutch
