Process
"How much would a website cost?" is a bit like asking "how much does a car cost?" — technically answerable, but not usefully so. A fair, accurate quote depends on scope, and scope depends on a handful of questions that are worth answering honestly before anyone asks for a number.
Not "what pages does it need" — what job is it doing? A site whose main goal is generating enquiry form submissions is built differently to one whose goal is looking credible to a specific list of five prospective clients, which is different again from one whose goal is ranking for a competitive set of local search terms. The goal shapes almost everything downstream: what gets emphasised, what gets measured, and where the budget should actually go.
This single question often decides the platform. A site that gets new content weekly needs a genuinely good CMS and an editor-friendly admin experience. A site that might get touched twice a year is a very different build — sometimes a CMS is actually the wrong answer entirely, because it adds an ongoing maintenance burden (updates, security patches) for a benefit the client will rarely use.
Booking systems, payment providers, a CRM, an email marketing platform, a review platform — integrations are very often where a "simple site" quietly turns into a bigger project. It's much better to know about a required Calendly or Stripe integration in the first conversation than to discover it halfway through a build that assumed a static contact form.
"As soon as possible" isn't a timeline — it's a request to skip the parts of the process that catch problems early. A launch date tied to a trade show, a funding deadline, or a rebrand announcement is a real constraint I can plan around. A vague sense of urgency usually means there's room to do this properly, and it's worth finding out which one you're actually dealing with before committing to dates.
More enquiries, higher search rankings for named terms, a site the client isn't embarrassed to hand a business card next to, fewer support calls asking "how do I change the opening hours" — these are different outcomes that get measured differently, and it's worth agreeing which one matters most before work starts, rather than discovering a mismatch at the review stage.
A number without this context is either padded to cover the unknown, or optimistic and wrong. Working through these questions first — even informally, over a phone call — is what turns "how much for a website" into an actual, defensible quote, and it's usually the difference between a project that goes smoothly and one that grows scope arguments halfway through.
Send over the rough shape of what you need and I'll ask the follow-up questions that actually matter for your case.