I'll keep this short since I'm running late to some college classes; but it broils down to this: I run a child care center. The Website sucks from having walls of text. (No, I didn't make it)

We're with register.com. Anyone know some website designers that could make a better website? (I like Kindercare's due to its simplicity, lots of pictures, flash, and all the important info right up front.)

How much do designers normally charge for a small-business 4-5 page site? I'm setting up a google adwords account to draw attention to it; any other suggestions?

If you are running flat html with no dynamic content and you don't care about editing content manually, you may be better off going with a template (template monster, etc).

The cost of designers vary. A good professional custom site for a small business can run four or five digits. It depends entirely on what you want to do.

The cost of a website can vary as much as the cost of a building.

edit:
What you need to think of when calculating cost:
- What is the intent of the site?
- What features does the site need to fulfill this intent? What feature are "must" and what features are "nice if the price is reasonable"/can be added later?

As you would expect, using a pre-canned product, design, or artwork is generally less expensive than getting something custom. Every approach has pros and cons.

Ghost of Forums Past fucked around with this message on 04-15-2010 at 12:21 PM.

I built my wife's site and her opera company's site in Wordpress; makes for a pretty site with minimal effort. You can do this yourself or, if it's really over your head, I can build it for...I dunno, $200?

Dont use stock photos like that kindercare place

I'm still trying to cope with the idea that RK runs a child care center.

A friend of mine at work uses wix.com for his small business website. Its template based, but from what I see can be made to look pretty professional. Havent messed with it too much myself, though.

Most web design companies are godawful. Every jackass who's ever learned HTML thinks he's a web designer/developer, so it makes it tough to find a decent one. If you go cheap, you'll get what you pay for. If you go expensive, you'll probably still have a terrible site because they'll overdo it with a bunch of Flash that makes the site useless.

If I were building a brand new site right now, I'd find a buddy with some aesthetic talent and have him build a mockup for me, then get a coder who can put it together. Hiring a company to do everything usually ends in tragedy. This is especially true if you're going to be dumping money into Adwords.

Do some basic research on SEO and usability. Even if you hire somebody to handle everything for you, you'll almost always be better off knowing some of the basics of these so you can point out flaws in what they give you and make sure they get corrected. These things matter much, much more than having a pretty site.

This stuff is extremely important in making sure your site is successful, and the vast majority of sites completely ignore it. You'll want a leg up.

useit.com is a great resource for usability. Go through and read stuff that seems relevant in the Alertbox. For SEO, I can't really remember the best place to get started and there's a lot of misinformation out there. If you care about it, I can give you a quick crash-course if you'd like.

Wordpress is also a very easy solution.

Thanks for the input, I've been kinda bogged down in other things lately but I plan on using all the advice.