If you are asking how much a website costs in Sussex, the honest answer is that it depends on what the site has to do. A brochure site for a dog groomer in Burgess Hill and a booking site for a group of holiday lets near Rye are both "a website", but they are very different jobs. This guide explains what makes a project bigger or smaller, walks through three worked examples, and shows how we put a quote together, so you can judge any quote you receive, from us or anyone else.
Why we quote rather than publish prices
Every project we take on is quoted on its scope after a short conversation. Quotes are free, written and itemised, so you can see what each part of the work covers and decide what to keep, add or leave for later. A published figure would either be too high for the simplest sites or too low for the complex ones, and neither helps you plan.
What drives the cost of a website
Number of pages
Every page needs planning, design, content and testing. A site with five pages is a short project. A site with a page for every service, every town covered and every branch takes far longer, because each page has to earn its place and work with the rest.
Who writes the copy
Content is often the most underestimated part of a website. If you write your own text, the job is smaller. If you want us to interview you and write the pages, or rewrite an old site's text so it matches the searches your customers make, that is real work and it appears as its own line in the quote.
Design depth
Adapting a proven layout to your brand is quicker than a fully custom design. Both can work well. A bespoke design makes sense when your brand or your audience needs something distinctive, such as a boutique hotel or a design-led shop, and less sense for a trade business whose customers mainly want a phone number and proof of good work.
Features and integrations
Booking systems, online payments, a shop, member areas, a CRM that receives your enquiries, or a feed that pulls in stock or availability all add development and testing time. Connecting to a system you already use is usually simpler than building something new, but every connection has to be tested properly. See our web development page for the kinds of features we build.
Photography
Real photos of your premises, your team and your work almost always beat stock images. If you already have good photos, the job is simpler. If you need new ones, a photographer's fee sits alongside ours, and we will tell you this at the start rather than at the end.
SEO set-up
Every site we build launches with the basics in place: sensible titles, a clean structure, fast pages and a sitemap. Going further at launch, with keyword research for each page, town pages or moving an old site's rankings across safely, adds to the scope. Ongoing SEO to rank for competitive searches is a separate monthly service.
Ongoing care and support
After launch, a site needs looking after. Our care plan covers hosting, security updates, backups and uptime checks, and it is priced to your site in the quote. Changes and new work beyond the care plan, such as a new page or a seasonal offer, are support, quoted per request or as a block of hours.
Three worked examples
These are made-up examples to show how scope changes a project. They are not real clients.
A sole trader's five-page site
A self-employed gardener in Shoreham needs a home page, a services page, a page of past jobs, an about page and a contact page. They can write a first draft of the text and already have good photos on their phone. A proven layout in their colours is enough, and there are no integrations beyond a contact form. This is about as small as a professional site gets: few pages, little copywriting, no features to connect, and a light care plan afterwards.
A café or shop that wants to sell or take orders
A café in Lewes wants a menu that is easy to update, a page for private hire and an online ordering link for cakes. The page count is still modest, but the menu needs a simple editing set-up, the ordering needs testing on phones, and the owner would like help writing the pages. That puts it in the middle: more design and copy work than the gardener, and one integration to get right.
A firm with several offices and a booking system
A physiotherapy practice with clinics in Crawley, Horsham and Haywards Heath needs a page for each clinic, a page for each treatment, a team page, online booking connected to its practice software and enquiries sent to the right clinic. It also wants town pages to rank locally and its old site's pages redirected so it keeps its existing search traffic. This is a much larger job: many more pages, copywriting across all of them, an integration that has to be tested at every clinic, and SEO set-up from day one. Health content also has to follow the advertising rules for the profession, which adds a careful review stage.
Running costs to plan for
Whatever size your site is, plan for these:
- Domain name. Renewed every year or every few years, paid to the registrar.
- Hosting and care. Either through our care plan or arranged by you.
- Paid tools. Booking systems, email marketing tools and some plugins have their own subscriptions, paid to the companies that run them.
- Marketing. SEO, PPC or social media if you want more visitors than the site will bring on its own. With PPC, the ad spend is paid by you directly to Google or Meta, separate from our management fee.
How to compare quotes
When you compare quotes from Sussex web designers, ask each one:
- How many pages are included, and who writes the content?
- Is basic SEO set-up included?
- What happens after launch, and what does the care plan cover?
- Who owns the domain, the website and the accounts once it is paid for?
- Can I update the site myself?
The answers matter more than the final total. With us, you own your website files, copy, designs and domain once you have paid in full.
Get a free quote
Send us a few lines about your business and what the site needs to do through our contact page. We will reply with questions, then a free, written, itemised quote. If you already have a website, our free SEO audit tool can show you where it stands before you decide.