The age-old question: What does a website cost?

I recently read an excellent article by web developer/author Emira Mears on the cost of a website. It’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? It’s highly intangible at first, and most developers don’t want to answer it too quickly without knowing the full scope of your project. There are as many answers to the question as there are design studios.

All I can tell you is how we answer the question. In other words, I’m going to list real prices that WE actually charge our clients, at the risk of giving off the impression that I’m trying to sell you something. I’m not. These numbers are purely to inform you of what the market looks like for a small, young (as in…we’ve only been open since February 2008), independent studio such as ours.

For your additional info, we are based out of a private residence, and we are not located in a high-priced locale such as New York or San Francisco (we’re in Virginia Beach, which is not “up there” as far as cost of living goes, but it’s not “down there” either.) These factors affect our prices.

With that warning in place, here are some benchmarks to consider when trying to figure out how far your budget will take you:

1. The smallest of the small budgets ($300+): If your budget’s pretty tiny, you can still have a nice website. There are hundreds of excellent WordPress themes out there (and no, your website does not have to be a “blog” for it to be powered by WordPress…that’s a misconception.) You can usually get a website like this customized for you for as little as $300, not including hosting and a domain name ($100+ per year.)

   Granted, you will have limitations, and you will have to add all of the content yourself, but the Content Management System (i.e. WordPress) that you use should make that relatively simple. That’s an additional bonus to using a CMS, in fact. Your maintenance costs will be lower because you can do the majority of it yourself. Template customizations are the Ramen noodles of the web design world. Tasty and cheap.

   (Note: Not ALL template customizations are simple. They can range in the thousands if the theme is complex or if you need additional modifications and functionality that the template does not provide. The Revolution theme comes to mind as an example of a theme that requires more complex customization.)

2. A small budget ($900+) (yeah I know…that still seems like a good chunk of change to most of us): Let me just be honest here. If you want a professionally-designed website on the cheap, go for a template customization. Even the smallest, simplest of websites require a LOT of time in every stage of development. Yes, even a website that is small (determined by number of pages) and simple (determined by level of functionality) is going to be much higher-priced than a template customization.

   So let’s just throw it out there — the simplest websites that we create start at $900. And no, this is not expensive in the web design world. It’s about on the same level as Chef Boyardee. Not quite Ramen noodles, but we’re close.

   And what does a small, simple website look like? Mainly a static website (one where the pages are always the same, no matter which way you click) that has a handful of pages and a contact form. Not huge, but it’s a start. And it can definitely be enough to get your name out there.

3. A small-medium budget ($2000+): With a little bit of a larger budget, you’re going to get more pages and more functionality. Your website might have a blog in place. It might have a newsletter. Our website fits in this category. If you were eating it for dinner, it’s more like the store-bought Rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans of web development.
4. A medium budget ($3500+): In addition to more pages and more functionality, here’s where you get to start adding things like shopping carts and integrated payment systems into your repertoire. It’s not going to get you anything like Amazon, but you can definitely cover your basic shopping cart needs if this is your budget. Kind of like your Sunday dinner of websites.
5. A medium-large budget ($5000+): Here’s where you can start getting a little dynamic. Instead of having a static (non-interactive) website, you can start to add some user functionality. Maybe you want to offer an online help desk to your clients. Maybe you want them to be able to search for your products in a slew of different ways. Maybe you want your visitors to be able to create a simple profile that they can update themselves. Now we’re getting to the Thanksgiving dinner of web design.
6. A large budget ($8,000+): If you want to start your own social networking site or site that has a lot of different things that the user can do, you could do it with a budget this size. Granted, on the lower end of this scale, you’re going to have much less functionality than the higher end (and believe me folks, some websites take half a million or more to produce…these are usually developed by large studios or are done in-house). So here we have the filet mignon of website development.

Now if you go with a larger, more established studio or a highly talented, established freelancer, you can pretty much double or triple those base prices. If you go with a less experienced freelancer, or a designer who uses HTML-authoring software to produce horribly mangled code (sorry…couldn’t help but throw that in there!), you can cut those base prices in half or even thirds.

So you see, that’s why developers generally avoid the “How much do websites cost” question. Because it’s absolutely impossible to answer. And I probably shouldn’t have even attempted it, but I’m a glutton for punishment. I have to be because I’ll probably get lots of nasty emails from web designers who say I’m completely off the mark. Which is okay. You can’t compare apples to oranges, and you can’t compare one web developer to another based on price alone.

A better way of figuring out how much a web developer charges is actually not based on the quote they might give, but on their hourly rate. $75-$250 is the going range at the time of this publication. (Our rate is currently $90.) In the past several years, I have only seen one professional who charged less than $75 (and no, I don’t remember who it was.)

Another factor to consider is the level of service that a web developer offers. For example, for us, the cheapest template customization is probably going to consist of one or two consultations, via phone or email. There would be no more than one mock-up and one round of modifications. Once the template was implemented, it would be in the owner’s hands. We really are loving about the whole thing, but we can’t do more than that or it would cease being a cheap option.

A fully developed website is a whole different sack of potatoes (I’m not sure why I’m into the food analogies today. Perhaps because I just came back from the dentist, and it hurts to eat. Moving on.) That level of service would include several phone or face-to-face meetings, a full range of creative concepts discussed, a plan for the information architecture of the site, one or more fully developed mock-ups, several rounds of modifications, implementation of a test site, rigorous testing before the launch, etc. etc.

A wise sage (okay, my husband) once told me that there are three factors in any project: price, quality, and speed. You can only pick two. I think that about sums it up.