Commercial web design - how much?

We could sit here all day pointing out terrible sites, but here's one that I had to use last week and couldn't quite believe just how horrific it was. If you want to see a classic case of a website presenting quite possibly the worst impression I've ever seen for high value products (£25,000 projector anyone?) then take a look here.

Unless part of a very well planned (and somewhat risky) reverse marketing strategy, there is no excuse for something like that.

There seem to be plenty of poor sites in your business field:

http://home.global.co.za/~ewtplant/
http://website.lineone.net/~richardcorris/richardsweb/

I've also noticed a number of 'so what' type sites within your industry. Sites that do the job but just don't appear memorable or likely to inspire interaction:

http://www.gamble-jarvis.co.uk/
http://www.parker-hire.co.uk/

A couple of clean, professional sites that may have some relevance to your area of business are:

http://www.hewden.co.uk
http://www.kennards.com.au

Regarding your specific requirements, I'd say that the majority of what you're looking to do really shouldn't cost you too much for a quality design (around the level of the two decent sites listed above, albeit with less content) and development. For the following elements:

"Promote brand identity
Allow customers to select product appropriate to their needs
then to trigger and booking enquiry form for us to follow up / later to allow registered customers to make an online booking
give information about the company including contact details"

We would be looking at no more than £990 to include your own content management area with admin back-end, so that you could control the addition of News items, press releases, company activities etc.

The area that would require more investment would be:

"Provide a means of checking availabilty for date of hire and duration of hire"

as this would require a database that you had access to in order to 'check in' and 'check out' the various equipment's availability dates. It is also worth mentioning at this stage that these types of facilities can only ever be as successful as the company in control of them makes them... ie, you need somebody at your end who remembers to religiously keep things up to date - something we find a lot of smaller, start-up companies sometimes don't have time to do as conscientiously as they might like.

Also, not wishing to teach Granny to suck eggs, it may actually not be wise to include this facility from the outset as it could put potential customers off contacting you. Let's say Mr X is looking to hire a cement mixer and needs it from 1st to 6th of December, he comes onto your site and asks for availability for 1st December but another customer has it booked from 30th Nove to 1st Dec. Mr X sees that he can't hire from you and goes elsewhere.

If you simply showed that you hire cement mixers and ask interested parties to contact you (via a product specific contact form with fields for dates required), you could then assess the situation, see whether you could sub-contract another mixer for that period or might even find that Mr X could wait another day for the mixer to become free and offer a slight discount as a sweetener.

The key to any website being a success is contact. If the customer doesn't contact you, you have NO chance of doing business. Even if they contact you and you're unable to assist at that particular time, you have at least eastablished some relationship and may be able to offer your services in the future.

If it were me, I'd concentrate on getting a great company/brand identity online and ensure you present all your products and service as positively and professionally as possible. If you found over time that an availability checker was something your users demanded, simply add it at a later date, which might also help with budgeting and paying for the site.