What an escort website costs

Template or bespoke.

A template is fast and cheap, and it looks like every other site built on it. You rent the platform, follow its rules, and usually cannot take the design with you when you leave. A bespoke site costs more because the identity, the structure and the photography presentation are made for you, and because the domain and the content are yours from the first day. The right answer depends on what the site has to do for your business, not on which is cheaper this month.

What drives the price.

For an independent, the main variables are the number of pages, how much photography has to be prepared and how it is presented, whether an age gate or age verification is required, and what the enquiry route needs to do. For an agency, the collection adds most of the cost: how many profiles, what the grid and the filters have to do, galleries and film, availability, new and recommended collections, and a content management system your team will actually use.

Three further things move the number for anyone. Migration from an existing site, done properly with a source inventory, validated mappings, a trial import and a recoverable copy. Several brands on one foundation with separate permissions. And the systems behind the surface: screening workflows, approved-answer assistance in the contact panel, integrations with the tools you already use.

What you should receive for the money.

The domain registered in your name. The content in a form you can export. A site that works on a phone, loads quickly, can be used with a keyboard and a screen reader, and is written in HTML a search engine can read. A documented handover, so a change of designer is possible. And a designer who does not run a directory or keep a stake in your audience.

Ongoing costs.

A website is not finished at launch. Hosting, the domain renewal, maintenance, monitoring and the small improvements that keep a site current are real costs, and they should be agreed as a plan at launch rather than discovered later. Ask for them in writing before you compare quotes, because a low build price with an expensive retainer is a different proposition from the reverse.

How MUMEI scopes a project.

We begin with your identity, your audience and the systems you already use, and agree the brief and what success looks like. The quote follows the brief and covers what the brief covers. Design is reviewed in working prototypes, so there are no surprises when the real content arrives. The support that follows launch is agreed before it, scoped to how much you want to do yourself.

Questions to ask any designer.

• Who owns the domain, and whose name is it registered in?
• Can I export my content, photographs and profiles if I leave?
• What happens to my images: sizes, previews, watermarks, descriptions?
• Who hosts the site, and what does that cost each year?
• What is included after launch, and what costs extra?
• Do you run a directory, an agency or anything that competes with me?