There’s Never Been A Better Time To Upgrade Your Website
Historically, Aberdeen businesses have been relatively slow to recognise the importance of good web design. The city’s economy has always been something of a bubble; buoyed up by an insular oil and gas industry that was small enough to ensure that everyone knew everyone.
In an environment like that, there was no real pressure to put your best foot forward – or ensure that your website delivered a compelling message about your businesses’ capabilities, competence and
But things are changing fast. A recent report from Opportunity North East (ONE) notes that the region’s economy is starting to open up, with many new and established businesses turning to wider audiences as they attempt to grow their market share and establish themselves as global players.
Our life science sector is booming, local food and drink businesses are on track to turn over £2.2 billion per year and our burgeoning tech ecosystem is driving growth across the board (source: ONE). But success isn’t guaranteed.
If you’re running an Aberdeen business that aspires to grow and attract new customers, digital transformation will be key to fulfilling your ambitions.
While it is (technically) possible to grow a business with a one-page, brochure website, modern B2B and B2C audiences expect you to have a grown up and fully-functioning website that provides a proper overview of your products and services,
Will Professional Web Design Really Make A Difference?
To be clear, there’s plenty of evidence to show that high-quality web design can make a world of difference to your bottom line. According to Behaviour & Information Technology, it takes visitors 0.05 seconds to form an impression of a website (source: Review 42).
And a study published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 94% of first impressions are design based (source: ACM Digital Library).
More to the point, research shows that 48% of web users cite web design as the number one factor in deciding on the credibility of a business and a further 38% say that they’ll stop browsing if they don’t like the layout or design of a site they’re visiting (source: Blue Corona).
So if you want to reach and convince prospective customers, studies show that your website needs to look the part.
But the endless reams of positive evidence have done little to stop people peddling the myth that professional web design services are often “overhyped”. Spend five minutes talking shop with the owner-operator of a long-running SME and they’ll probably tell you that having a very simple brochure site has never hurt their business.
Or that their industry is “all word of mouth” anyway, so there’s no point in investing a lot of money in a well-designed web site.
As noted earlier, Aberdeen’s business community used to be fairly insular. Everybody knew everybody else and most local companies were working with vendors, suppliers or clients that were based in the surrounding area.
Oil companies were the obvious exception, but again, Aberdeen’s oil and gas industry has always been a tight-knit community where word of mouth may well have been enough to sustain or grow a successful company.
But the fact is that there’s always been a much larger market for the goods and services Aberdeen provides.
There are people out there right now, searching Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo for the things you do better than anyone else – irrespective of whether you’re building the high-tech case strings used to plug unproductive oil wells, or offering independent financial advice from a tiny office in Royal Deeside (source: Digital Marketing From The Coalface).
To reach these people, you need a website that tells a convincing story about your business. That cements you as a genuine authority and leaves potential customers with the impression that they can trust you to take care of their problems.
To accomplish that in an increasingly crowded marketplace, you need professional web design.
Does Designing A Website Have To Be Hard?
In a word, no. Designing an attractive, functional and persuasive website isn’t rocket science. A lot of work goes into things that may seem relatively simple to someone who doesn’t live and breathe this stuff:
The precise placement of key messaging (like page headings) can be the difference between someone ‘sticking’ to your page or bouncing away to look at a competitor’s site. Video content has to jump out and grab people's attention and real time has to be spent making sure that the look and feel of every page does a good job of communicating your brand's identity to prospective customers.
But the actual nuts and bolts of designing and building a decent website? It’s a breeze to anyone working in the web design industry. To help you get started with your project - and find the right partner - we’ve compiled a detailed ‘to-do’ list that walks you through the process step-by-step.
Step 1: Setting A Budget For Your Website
Setting a realistic budget is hard. In fact, it’s probably one of the most challenging parts of commissioning a new website because every agency and freelancer has a different way of charging for their work – and there’s really no easy way to work out how much your dream site is going to cost until you’ve sat down with a professional, and specced out the full design and build (source: Digital Marketing From The Coalface).
That said, there are some simple ways to work out roughly how much you’re going to spend. This is undoubtedly the best place to start because it’ll help you work out whether you should be speaking to a freelancer, a smaller (boutique) web design agency or a more established web design partner.
But we’ll talk about that in more detail later. For now, let’s look at how to come up with a rough budget for your web project.
First things first, we need to work out how much custom design work you’re going to need. If you’re happy to use a standard theme or pre-built template for your pages, you’ll probably be able to pay a freelance web designer +/- £600 to throw something simple together. That’s approximately two days worth of work,
But the end result is going to look pretty basic. These ‘cookie cutter’ websites are generally fine for new businesses that are trying to prove that there’s a market for their services and/or need to get up and running on a shoestring budget.
But they won’t do much for your credibility and there’s very little chance that they’ll do the extra work needed to convince or convert people who’re on the fence about working with your brand.
For a more reputable website with custom-built page designs, prices generally start at around £5,000. That’ll buy you a basic 10-20 page website that looks good and functions well. But prices do rise once you start adding more page designs.
If you want something that looks and feels slick, with several different page templates for category and product pages – or a bespoke template for each and every one of your pages, you’re probably looking at something north of £10,000.
And if you need custom functionality like animated or interactive elements, live social media feeds, smart CTAs or live chat, you should expect to budget more for the work involved in creating them. Ditto for websites that’ll need to hook up with third-party tools like CRMs or ERP systems.
Truth be told, websites that need to do all of this, showcase compelling content and provide an engaging user experience (UX) can cost upwards of £40,000. For most Aberdeen businesses, we think it’s probably reasonable to estimate somewhere between those two figures (so £10,000 - £40,000) depending on your desired feature list and the importance of cutting-edge design work.
If you’re really struggling to land on your budget it may be worth talking to one of Aberdeen’s established web design agencies. We have a thriving digital sector here, and most of the bigger players will be more than happy to talk you through the best way to set a budget for your web design project in more detail.
Step 2: Picking A Platform For Your Website
Now you’ve got a budget, you’ll probably want to pick a platform to build your site on. To be clear, a platform, sometimes referred to as a content management system or CMS, is software that designers and developers use to build your new website.
You’ll then use this platform to log in to the backend of your website, upload or update digital marketing content, analyse the performance of your website and manage things like your customer accounts.
It’s a much more grown-up version of the old-fashioned approach, where websites are custom-coded from the ground up –providing you with a lot of flexibility and ensuring that your team find it easy to keep your site up to date.
There are lots of web platforms to choose from, including well-known examples like Wordpress, HubSpot and Joomla, eCommerce-specific CMSs like Shopify and more niche options like Drupal.
Truth be told, most of Aberdeen’s web design and development agencies should be able to work with any modern CMS and the overwhelming majority are pretty interchangeable in terms of features and functionality but it’s worth noting that some platforms are specifically designed for niche applications.
HubSpot is a good example of this. It's a very powerful platform with extra functionality that you won't get if you opt to use something like Wordpress.
But a lot of these features are designed to help you streamline or automate your sales and marketing efforts so if you’re just going to set up a simple brochure site, you may be better off with a simple Wordpress site.
Rather than letting this mini-essay run on any longer, we’ll look at seven of the most popular platforms in use today:
Wordpress
The world’s most popular CMS, Wordpress was originally designed for blogging and has pretty basic core functionality. But a thriving marketplace, with an enormous selection of 3rd-party plugins, themes and extensions allows you to turn a basic Wordpress install into a fully-functioning site that can be used to promote your business.
It’s not a great fit for eCommerce applications but it’s user-friendly and most Aberdeen web designers will have worked with it at some point. It’s the Ford Fiesta of CMSs and a great choice if you’re building on a tight budget.
HubSpot
Originally designed to simplify and empower inbound marketing campaigns, HubSpot is now a well-developed ecosystem with a best-in-class CRM, marketing and sales automation tools, service desk/ticketing functionality and a full suite of tools for burgeoning RevOps departments.
Subscriptions can be quite pricey but it’s worth noting that there are free versions of most HubSpot tools (this website is built on a free version of HubSpot CMS) so if you’re trying to actively grow a brand online, a certified HubSpot developer should be one of the first people you talk to.
It’s also worth noting that HubSpot provide hosting and site maintenance as part of their subscription costs so you will save some money over self-hosted platforms like Wordpress and Joomla here.
Joomla
While its popularity has declined in recent years, Joomla is still the platform of choice for many B2B websites. Open source and supported by a massive community of 3rd-party developers, the platform is incredibly flexible. It’s also cheap to develop on, and relatively intuitive which makes it a great choice for anyone that’s looking for a well-designed website that’s easy to use.
Pick a Joomla web design specialist if you want something that does the job well, and doesn’t waste time with unnecessary bells and whistles.
Shopify
A ‘one-stop-shop for all things eCommerce, Shopify is designed to help you get an online store up and running with minimum hassle. It has all the advanced inventory, account and order management tools you need to buy and sell things online, it’s supported by a well-developed market of 3rd party plugins and it has its own payment gateway to boot.
It’s probably not a great choice for B2B sites or sites with a lot of text or video content but if you are trying to sell goods online, it should be your first port of call.
Squarespace / Wix
We’ve grouped Squarespace and Wix together because they are both low-cost platforms designed to help people DIY a functional website that looks reasonably professional.
Web design experts can use Squarespace and Wix to build very attractive websites but it is worth noting that they have relatively limited feature-sets and it can be a struggle to make them look as good as a fully-bespoke HubSpot or Joomla build.
Subscription costs are low and cover hosting though, and their drag-and-drop functionality does make them very user friendly. If you’re on a tight budget, you could do worse.
Drupal
An open-source solution that started life as a student project, Drupal is incredibly flexible and can be customised to do pretty much anything you can imagine. That said, the system is fairly unintuitive and it can be quite finicky to use.
Drupal is a good choice if you need very specific and specialist functionality that can’t be implemented using Wordpress, Hubspot etc but there is a shortage of good Drupal designers/developers in Aberdeen’s digital sector so this one should probably be lower down your list of prospective platforms.
Step 3: Picking A Web Design Partner
With a budget and a platform in the bag, your next step will be finding the right web design partner. In terms of the size or type of organisation you’ll be working with, you have four main options:
The Self-Build Route
Learning to design websites isn’t easy. Learning to build them is (arguably) even harder but it’d be remiss of us to pretend that you can’t develop your own website. If you’ve got a lot of free time, access to Google and a knack for rapidly acquiring technical skills it might be worth going the DIY route.
But it certainly isn’t easy or cost-effective, so we wouldn’t recommend trying this unless you’re particularly desperate.
Hiring A Freelance Web Designer
This is a great option if you have a limited budget, or want to launch a very simple site. There are serious cost savings to be made by hiring a freelancer but it is worth remembering that you’ll lose access to the developed support offerings provided by professional agencies.
You may find that your project runs long, or that relatively minor post-launch bugs take a long time to resolve. You’ll also need to remember that you’ll be at the whims of a single individual when it comes to getting future updates implemented on your site but there’s no getting round the fact that this is by far the cheapest (sensible) way to develop a site
Hiring A Boutique (10-20 Person) Web Agency
Compared to working with a freelance designer, hiring a smaller Aberdeen-based web design agency represents a big step up. You can expect more responsive service, a more rigorous initial discovery/prototyping process, Access to a multi-disciplinary team and a timely response to queries and/or change requests.
Obviously service does vary from agency to agency but we like to think that Aberdeen’s digital sector is well-developed, and you’re unlikely to get bad service from any agency that’s been up and running for more than 5-10 years.
It’s also worth noting that smaller agencies will also go above and beyond for their clients. In fact, smaller client bases and a higher-than-average level of service is generally the defining feature of a small web agency but you may find that smaller agencies are much more specialised/less generalist than their larger counterparts, which means they may not be able to take on all types of web design/development work.
Engaging With A Large (20+ Person) Web Design Agency
For complex projects, larger sites or digital growth campaigns that need to deliver tangible results, it can often be tempting to turn to larger or flashier web agencies. Thing is, the advantages vs. a small agency are fairly minimal.
A larger agency may have more staff, which means web design and build times may be shorter but you’ll also lose the personal touch and dedication that sets smaller, boutique web agencies apart from their larger counterparts.
You could also argue that larger agencies tend to have more rigorous processes than their smaller counterparts, but they also have higher overheads and need to charge more for the same level of work. If you have money to burn and/or specifically want to work with a team of account and project managers, a large agency is the way to go.
Step 4: Designing Your Website
If this is your first site build, you may be wondering how much input you’ll need to provide. Are you going to be picking out all the colours and fonts, or will your shiny new web agency get annoyed at you for trying to ‘meddle’ in their bespoke processes?
The answer - as always - depends on who you’re working with. The area’s most experienced web design agencies will probably start your engagement with a consultation or discovery session that’s designed to help them spec out your new site.
More often than not, this will involve a 2-6 hour meeting where they’ll work with you to establish who you’re trying to target, and how to go about reaching your ideal customers.
This will be a collaborative process that interrogates your pre-existing branding, explores your audience’s preferences and equips your web design partner with all the information they need to design a website that’s capable of growing your business.
Discovery sessions also seek to work out whether you’ll need more images, videos and graphics to promote your business online; gathering the information needed to create compelling content that gets you found and help your new partner develop a marketing strategy for your website.
But if you’re working with a smaller or less experienced partner, you may find that they opt for a simpler process. Some Aberdeen web design companies will give you a list of the logos, images, brand guidelines and content that they’ll need to build your new website. Others will simply copy and paste assets for your
If you want to know how involved you’ll be in the process, ask your prospective web design partner. They should have no problem telling you about their internal processes and the degree to which you’ll be expected to “chip in”. Nine times out of ten, established web design agencies will also talk you through the why of it too – explaining how they approach web design projects from a practical and philosophical standpoint.
How Long Does Web Design Take?
Having established that your Aberdeen-based web design partner will set the scope and pace of your web project, you’re probably wondering how long it’ll take to get a new site up and running.
Truth be told, this varies according to the size and resourcefulness of your web partner, the complexity of your project and any exacerbating factors, like the speed with which you can supply on-page content.
Agencies with a lot of internal resource (designers, developers and marketing specialists) will be able to turn a large, enterprise-level website around in 6-8 weeks. Assuming, of course, that you can supply them with plenty of information and sign off on wireframes or page designs in good time.
Smaller agencies may take 8-16 weeks to design and develop a complex website but again, there are a lot of variables here.
Things like the number of different page designs (or templates) you need, the volume of content that needs to be migrated and the amount of interactive elements that need to be built before your new site can be published will have a tremendous impact on the length of time it’ll take to complete your project.
And if you’re working with a one-man band, your time to launch will depend on their current workload, focus and drive.
While working with a one-man band can be very advantageous (in the sense that it lets you cut out some of the extraneous red tape you’ll find at bigger agencies) it’s worth remembering that your project will live and die according to the whims of one person. Determined freelancers can get small sites up and running in approximately 2-3 weeks.
But larger, more complex projects may end up stuck in development hell for several months.
This problem is only compounded if you’re trying to design a complex site (not using a pre-bought template) or launch with advanced functionality like calculators, smart CTAs or video banners.
If you have a set launch date - or plan to design and launch a complex website - larger agencies will be better placed to deliver on-time. If your project is small, simple and straight-forward, smaller vendors may be capable of turning things around on a tighter timescale.
How Do I Get My Web Project Off The Ground?
Your first step will be to find a partner. If you’re local and want to work with an Aberdeen web design company, jump on Google or head to a trusted, 3rd-party directory like Clutch or Hubspot's Solutions Directory.
These sites (Google included) let you read some reviews and/or browse a given agency's portfolio – not the best way of vetting, but a good start nonetheless. Once you've compiled a list of 2-3 viable partners, we'd then recommend ringing round and asking if you can chat to some past customers.
Most reputable agencies will be more than happy to give you the contact details for some very happy clients, and this provides the perfect opportunity for you to start asking probing questions about their skillset.
Good luck and happy hunting! We know there are some great Aberdeen web design agencies and we're sure you'll find a fantastic partner.