How much should a Website Cost?

The first thing you need to determin is the Purpose of a Website. Sadly, the initial aim of a web designer was to create flashy, graphic laden works of art. The purpose of these was to look incredible at first glance and be admired for their artistic qualities... not much thought was put into how this was actually going to help a business make money. The result is that websites are now looked at as a necessary expense.

However, these days, web designers are quickly realising that websites should be the conerstone of a small businesses marketing strategy. They are often the first point of contact for a potential customer, they should be an interactive, frequently updated, near realtime view on a company. A knowledge hub that leads customers through a decison making process until they are happy to purchase or enquire. A website these days should pay itself off fairly quickly, whether you spend $3,000 or $30,000, you should be generating at least that much value from it in the reasonably short term.

How Much would a website cost from WebNet Interactive?

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Case Study

A customer of a small web design and marketing company based in New Zealand and Australia had a very basic website that they'd done on the cheap. It generated no sales or enquiries, and they were fairly embarrased about it as the rest of their company looked quite slick. They came to us, spent a bit more, and immediately noticed they were getting 5 enquiries from the website per week. Since every customer was worth a few hundred dollars a year, their website was paid off very quickly and has made money for them ever since.

Actual Cost

Determining how much you should pay for a web site is probably one of the least written about topics in the web design community and there is no magic formula to determine the appropriate cost for a new web site or for the cost of a website re-design.

In this article we will examine historical web design costs, component break down of web design costs, and to set some ranges for current web site design costs.

The cost of a web site can be broken down into timelines and for standardization purposes the web site cost basis for this example will be a small business with less than 25 employees located in a small city that wants a professional website design with 15 page website, hosting with email, domain name, and a high quality level with attention to detail.

1995 – 1997 Expected cost: $7,500 to $12,000
1998 – 2000 Expected cost: $6,000 to $10,000
2000 – 2004 Expected cost: $2,500 to $4,500
2004 – 2006 Expected cost: $2,000 to $7,500


As based on our questioner the research above the price for a web site has drastically dropped over the last decade. The reason for the drop in the cost a business should pay for a website is driven by two factors. The first of these factors is that there has been a 10x increase in the number web design companies that have entered the market over the past decade and the emergence of new tools that more easily allow web designer to create web sites. One interesting notable based on our research is that the cost of web sites has become more desperate of the last couple of years. We believe this change is due to the emergence of flash, “keeping up with the Jones” (i.e. higher customer demands for astatically pleasing web sites), and the specialization of web design firms as low cost, high quality, interactive, etc.

Now lets examine the components that go into determining how much a web site cost all based on average.

• Domain name: $9 a year
• Hosting: $75 to $200 a year depending on visitor traffic to the website
• Actual web design/graphics development time (15 page website): 60 hours to 150 hours
• Web site maintenance: $500 to $1250 a year depending on the number of updates

In breaking away from original case study of how much should a web site cost, listed below are some price ranges and costs for web design and web site development projects all based on averages. Note these are all ballpark figures, just to give a rough estimate.

Informational/small business web site cost

8 to 16 web pages
Custom graphics
Stock photos
Little or no flash
Web forms sending to email accounts
Project duration: 30 to 75 days
Web site cost range: $2,000 to $7,500

Corporate (100 or more employees) web site cost

25 to 75 web pages
Heavy use of flash
High quality design work on all web pages
Content management system
Extra components: Intranet, calendars, web site search
Project duration: 60 to 90 days
Web site cost range: $9,000 to $25,000

Ecommerce web site cost

100 to 1000 products
Shopping cart
Payment gateway integration
Product descriptions and images
Sales tax and shipping calculation
Customer and administrative control panel
Project duration: 60 to 120 days
Web site cost range: $5,000 to $15,000

Database driven website or web application

Dynamic web pages 20 to 2,000
Administrative control panel for web site management
Advanced programming skill sets required
Interactivity with web site visitor
Enterprise database (MS SQL Server or MySQL)
Project duration: 90 to 180 days
Web site cost range: $6,000 to $35,000

 
Parts of this article was taken from a small web design and marketing company based in New Zealand and Australia. Please visit them http://www.decisiveflow.com/