Hi,
If you're looking for a specifically designed site then you're going to want to be speaking to a decent designer (R300 to R700 an hour but lets settle on R350).
Your first meeting on deciding what you want, how many different types of pages you want, doing a full/parital layout/sitemap of your site, finding out what you like and what you don't like, etc, is probably going to take about 4 hours. That's R1400.
Then the designer is going to go home and do some research, try different fonts out, colour schemes, market research, etc, probably a day or 2, lets settle on 1.5 = 12 hours - R 4 250 (total R5 650).
Next they're going to actually start working on your designs, say you have a 5 page site, homepage, contact us, product/service page and 2 other generic pages. That's 4 'page types' that they need to design for at say 3/4 of a day for each type = 24 hours = R 8 400 (total R 14 050).
Then there's some back and forth (2 hours) between you and the designer and another 2 meetings of and hour each (total 6 hours - R2 100) and you have a final design bill of about R 16 150.
REMEMBER - you want something unique.
Now you need to pay a developers to implement those designs, at also a good rate of R350 an hour.
Initial meeting to discuss the designs and how it all fits together, what effects should be where, how the css is going to be best structured, etc - 4 hours (R 1 500)
Developers go and spec the whole thing out research technology (Joomla - not the easiest of beasts) - 2 hours and R 750 (total R 2 250).
Since it's Joomla, call it 6 hours per page type and you have R 2 100 (total R 4 350) plus another 4 hours for "stuff" - R 1 400 (total R 5 850).
Then 4 hours ( R 1 400) of back and forth with some modifications and your development bill is R 7 250.
This gives you a total of R 23 400.
If it's an ecommerce site then your "page type' increases to about 10 or 11 and your bill goes to about R 70 000 to R 110 000.
IF you use a template then you get to save design hours as your designer should spend less time designing and doing more tweaking colours and fonts. There will be an initial 'blast' of a couple of hours finding the best template to use but from there it's tweaking and not designing from scratch.
Off the top of my head, these are the different steps that are needed to design and develope a site. Adjust the hourly rate and times and see what your budget can afford.. Also remember that companies will charge more than freelancers.
I hope this post brings a little more insight to yourself and others regarding design and development.
Also - Very few developers are also good designers and very few designers are good developers. If you find someone good at both then expect to pay a premium.
