Web site design cost

What is the cost of a website?

Websites come in all shapes and sizes. Equally, the cost of web design will vary with the project size and time taken to develop it.  Pricing varies per each web design company. Some charge by the hour while others may offer flat-fee.

Doing your homework and ‘Scoping-Out‘ your website will always help to reduce your cost. Taking the time and effort in creating a Scope Document will:

1. Provide you with an apples-to-apples competitive bid from Design Firms.
2. Reduce the number of hours your chosen web design company spends creating your website. Both equate into SAVINGS!

So how much does a website cost? Simple answer, it varies. We have completed sites for hundreds of dollars less than listed below, as well as thousands over what we are mentioning. It just depends on the time it takes to develop the site. Again, the pricing in this article is to give you an idea of what you might expect to pay for a QUALITY WEBSITE, not one done by ‘Uncle Bubba’s nephew, Buford.

Let’s look at ‘Starter-Sites’ and ‘Advanced-Site’ pricing. These are relatively common sites in today’s website market.

Starter-sites sites are typically where a company begins their web presence. Starter websites for small-to-medium size companies can be superb value for the dollars spent. Many ‘Starter-Sites’ consists of a Home, About Us, Contact Us, Products and Services and Testimonials page. Of course, each business will have unique web page requirements, but these pages are relatively common for a business. A ‘Starter Site’ with a Quality Design (not an Uncle Bubba’s nephew design) will take about 30-50 hours to complete and run in the neighborhood of $1800-$5000.

Now with that said, we have developed ‘Starter-Sites’ as little as $1000.00  if the client does his homework and provides scope document and prepared content. We have also developed ‘Starter-Sites’ over $10,000. Each project is unique in design and development time.

Advanced Websites are the next progression for a company web presence; many times being the second phase of web development projects. ‘Advanced Websites’ would include the same pages as ‘Starter-Sites’ as well as other advanced elements. These advanced website elements might be a home page with a Slider and Landing page, other products database and sub-product database pages and a Custom Content Management System known as CMS. All of the components listed above require more development time, which again equates to increased cost. An ‘Advanced Web Site’ on average would contain 20-30 pages and would take approximately 90-150 hours to complete. Costing $5000.00 – $12,000.00 on average.

Update: Website technology has changed since this page originated. Platforms such as WordPress have evolved into much more than just a Blog platform and can offer many clients the ability to have an advanced website with a CMS system for $3500.00 – $10,000.

Hosting should always be of concern with WordPress. Most WordPress sites are hosted on hosting server-farms that can have slow load-times under peak hours, and your website can be open to security holes and viruses/malware from other sites on the same server. If you are on a web server which houses 100s of sites and one of those sites gets hacked, the chances are the server resources are going to 100% usage, and your site is going to come to a halt. DO NOT SKIMP ON YOUR WEB HOSTING AND NEVER HOST YOUR BUSINESS SITE ON A SERVER FARM! Period! You have been warned.

WordPress has an extensive development community; that is a tremendous benefit. However, that large development community can be very dangerous also. Be sure to choose the right host if you decide to go the WordPress route. Our site that you are on right now is being run under the WordPress platform, we love it, but we use a specialty WordPress hosting service, even though we run own web servers.

We have a complete WordPress solution for you if you need it.