When two quotes for “a website” differ by a factor of three, it’s usually not that one agency is greedy. They’re pricing different things. Here is what the word covers.
The parts nobody itemises
A website people can find and use is roughly six jobs stacked together:
- Design — how it looks and how someone moves through it. Layout, typography, the path from landing to enquiry.
- Front-end build — turning that design into the pages a browser renders, on every screen size, for people using a keyboard or a screen reader.
- Back-end — anything that happens on a server: a contact form that stores and emails a lead, a login, a booking, a payment.
- Content structure — the model behind the pages, so “add a new case study” is filling in fields, not editing code.
- Infrastructure — where it’s hosted, the domain, SSL, the deploy process, backups.
- The non-visible layer — SEO basics, analytics, performance, accessibility, the 404 page, redirects from the old URLs.
A cheap quote usually covers the first two. The gap is the other four, and that’s where a site either works as a business tool or just exists.
Static or dynamic, and why it’s on your bill
A static site is built once into plain files and served as-is. It’s fast, cheap to host, hard to break, and enough for most marketing sites — even ones with a blog and a CMS, because the pages are rebuilt when content changes, not on every visit.
A dynamic site assembles pages per request. You need it when the content is genuinely per-user or real-time: an account area, a live inventory, a dashboard. It costs more to build and run.
Plenty of sites are sold as dynamic — often on WordPress — that would be faster, cheaper and safer as static. Ask which one you’re getting and why.
The CMS question
“Can I edit it myself?” has three honest answers:
- Yes, anything — a full CMS. More to build, more that can be changed
(and broken). 2. Yes, the parts that change — text, images, list items behind labelled
fields. Layout stays fixed. This is the right answer for most businesses. 3. No, you call us — fine for a small site that rarely changes, as long as
edits are quick and cheap.
The worst outcome is paying for (1) and getting (3).
What “done” should mean
Not “the build passed.” Done is: every page loads on the live domain, old URLs redirect to the new ones, the form produces both a stored record and a delivered email, it works with JavaScript disabled, and it’s been checked on the deployed site — not a local preview. Ask for that checklist before you sign off.
If you’re weighing a rebuild, our web development page lays out how we scope it, or get in touch with what you have now.
