Website Design Pricing
A major part of building a successful business starts online. Having a good looking and working website can attract and maintain relationships with customers. That being said, any business should know that there are costs associated with building, running, and maintaining an attractive, functioning site. Being able to budget for a site is key, which areas are essential? Which can you skip? How can you avoid unnecessary costs? How can you maximize your budget when it comes to your website? We will take a look at these questions, as we breakdown the costs associated with a website.
How Much Does a Website Cost Without a Professional?
To build a website without professional help will cost you between $300 – $800 on average. While doing it on your own can save you a few dollars, there are still costs associated with building a website. The biggest cost associated with building a website on your own is the time it takes. This is not a process that can be completed easily within a day or two, site maintenance requires attention after completion as well.
Skipping on certain costs in an effort to save money could mean losing customers. There are unavoidable costs, but these are the same costs that are essential to creating a smooth user experience, and maintaining professional appearance.
What Website Costs are Unavoidable?
There are many reasons why you would want to build a site on your own, maybe you have experience with coding or maybe you want to try and save a few dollars. But keep in mind that building a website on your own isn’t free either. Here are 7 unavoidable costs associated with website building.
The first cost associated with a website is the domain name. A domain name is the URL of your website. Investing in a domain name is essential as you physically will not be able to run your website without this. You will need to pay for a domain name regardless if you are working with a professional or not. A domain costs anywhere from less than a dollar, all the way up to 12$ a year, making this the cheapest part of your website.
Next you will need a place to host your site. Servers are different from softwares, For example, for a wordpress site (software), you still need a host (server). Servers can run you around $100 on the cheaper end and up to $600 on the pricier. You dont require the pricier option unless your site is pulling in more than 100 000 consumers a month.
The next cost is a cost associated with security and is put in place for consumers. An SSL certificate certifies your site as secure. If you host your site on certain servers, you may be allowed a free SSL certificate where others can run you up to $1000. SSL certificates are important in the age of internet security, consumers are significantly more likely to visit a secure page than a non secure page.
Following that you will want to use a theme on your site. Having a theme makes the appearance of your site much more appealing and attractive to customers. While there are free themes, paying for a little extra or company colours might not be a bad idea in the long run. These themes can cost you a few hundred dollars but easily pay themselves off with new customer conversions.
You should also add plugins to your site, they allow consumers to look at videos and animation, along with other content on your page (not HTML content) that otherwise could not be shown. To save time, and instead of spending hours sorting through free website plugins, try a paid one. They will provide a more complete experience when it comes to browsers. Once again contributing to positive customer interaction. Some plugins like Envira Gallery (69$ a year) cover yearly licensing costs, which means you have one less thing to worry about maintaining.
As well, you will want to invest in some stock photos or a photographer. Quality photos are key to creating and maintaining a professional website. Stock photos ensure you have a clean presentation on your site. A photo can cost you anywhere from under $10 to above $100. These costs can be avoided by taking your own photos though quality is not something that should be compromised.
Finally, maintenance costs money. Running into errors won’t just happen in the beginning. Errors happen days, weeks and months after a site has launched. There is no way to get around it. Below are some error pages that you will undoubtedly deal with resulting from personal, software or user error.
Avoiding losing all your work requires a data backup, you can purchase a service that will deal with maintenance issues for $40 – $300 a month.
If you feel that the work may be too much for you to take on by yourself there are options. You can hire an in house developer for around $120 an hour, additionally, there are different digital media and creative agencies are loaded with experience. While, premium wordpress can save you money but so will a professional developer. Once hired, these developers are able to prioritize building your site to the highest quality and manage user experience. The services they provide cover everything on your website from website design and execution, all the way to content creation and revisions.
How Much does a Professional Website Cost?
The total cost and size of your website from a professional varys largely based on company size. The total cost of a professional website ranges from $1000 – $100 000. The larger the company, the higher the cost. Large enterprises may want to opt for a more advanced solution where startups and smaller companies may do just fine with a basic model.
A basic website is the cheapest to build. This site can run you between $1000 – $10 000 From a professional. This site will look good but maybe wont have all the bells and whistles that an intermediate or advanced website has; however, that often isn’t needed for a small business site.
An intermediate website can run you from $10 000 up to $50 000. This website will be more advanced allowing content to be published with the goal of advancing marketing strategy. An intermediate website is ideal for a midsized business looking to make their biggest footprint online.
An advanced website is designed to accommodate large companies, and give a competitive edge that can result in a return on investments as well as higher conversion rates. For this reason an advanced site can cost anywhere between $50 000 to more than $100 000.
This all being said, these tiers don’t always reflect quality. Just because you purchase a basic package doesn’t mean you are getting poor quality, it just means that some of the functions associated with the advanced sites, you won’t have access to. A basic site is still just as user friendly and effective as an intermediate or advanced site.
What do Website Developers do? (Cost Breakdown)
Hiring a developer is perfect for someone who doesn’t have the time to spend on design along with development, or who is not program savvy. Don’t worry about not having a say in how your website looks and runs. Professional developers will consult you on design and development at every level. This is one of those things that you pay for what you get. If you go cheap, you risk the work you receive in return to reflect the cost. So with that information, take a look at where your money goes.
The depth and span of your site can affect your cost, if you only need 10 pages, it will be cheaper than a site requiring 25. Different agencies may offer you different packages for “x” number of pages, to which you can add onto for a small additional cost. The cost per additional page is around $100 per page after the package. However a site requiring 25 pages may cost around $1500 – 2500 and up.
In conjunction with size, custom style of your web layout and design can run up site costs. While starting from scratch is not very common, customizing templates is. This customization takes work and can be costly, how costly? Anywhere from $2000-$15 000 depending on complexity.
Another cost associated with site creation is copywriting. This is an offered feature that can save you boatloads in terms of time. Copywriting refers to the content displayed on various web pages. Creating quality content is something many business owners do not have the time for. The content created aims to work alongside the digital marketing strategy, strengthening search engine optimization. Good content is vital to generating the leads and customer base you want. The costs of copywriting can range from as low as $60 per page to $300 per page.
Hand in hand with copywriting is SEO. Briefly mentioned in the section above, SEO aims to improve the ranking of one’s website on different search engines like Google. Improved rankings mean that your site will appear higher up on Google’s pages. SEO aims to have more people clicking onto your page and then converting that person into a customer SEO service can cost $600 – $10 000.
Custom graphics including logos also are not free. Having unique, effective and memorable graphics and logos can increase brand recognition. This doesn’t come cheap though. A professional logo can cost a business anywhere in the range of $500 – $1000. When it comes to graphics, the cost will vary much more, seeing as special software is required for high quality graphics.
A great and unique benefit you will get from a creative agency is responsive custom pages. Perhaps you notice that your original word press functionality isn’t working quite how you were hoping. That is something creative agencies can tweak to your liking. This service can change on a case by case basis due to the fact that programmers have to play around and experiment with different codes.
Tacking onto custom response, we look at the doors that a creative agency opens when looking at your site on a mobile device. Optimizing a desktop site to perform on a mobile device is becoming a must. 51% of people’s only access to the internet is on their phones, by not optimizing your site you are losing out on over 2 billion potential customers. Custom optimization can cost $3000 all the way up to $25 000 depending on how you want to set it up.
E-Commerce along with other additional site amenities can cost a pretty penny, but it is critical to do them correctly. Having a smooth, reliable, and functioning ecommerce experience can reflect positively on your business. Additional site features run an average cost of $2000 – $25 000.
One thing to keep in mind is that while these are all options to add to your site, you don’t need to include all of these accommodations on your site. If you only need design, you don’t need to add ecommerce to your site. The other thing to note is that many creative agencies provide financing options for clients who prefer to pay their way bit by bit.
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From discussion to design to development to delivery, the process takes anywhere from 3 – 6 weeks though we always aim for a shorter delivery without sacrificing quality.
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© 23e2 Business Services Inc. | Working With 3rd Parties
© 23e2 Business Services Inc. | Working With 3rd Parties