Why Do Websites Cost What They Cost?

Curious about web design pricing? You can use our site pricing calculator to give you an idea of what a website may cost. Below the calculator section you can read in-depth information regarding all aspects of a web design that have an affect on pricing.

The Pricing in this calculator is meant only to give people an idea on the rough costs associated with building a website in 2019. As the details of every project are unique, each project will need to be estimated for final pricing. The information on this page is accurate for 2019 and is, based on research, pricing that falls around "the middle of the road".

How Does Web Design Factor into the Cost of Web Development

The amount of effort that goes into the web design when trying to figure the average cost of website design for small business plays a huge role in the final cost of the project. Anyone that has designed anything can tell you that a design typically doesn't end you just run out of time. You have pre-designed templates, custom designed from scratch or super high-end web design tailored very specifically for the client. All 3 can and will produce beautiful websites yet all have a different approach.

How Does Interior Page Design Approach Affect Website Costs?

There are two different kinds of interior pages that typically come across in web design projects. The first is content that is just nicely formatted and the second are interior pages that require a lot of design time. The difference between the two comes down to time spent on designing the pages.

Basic Interior Page Design: A page that just requires an image or two and some nicely formatted text requires significantly less time spent than the design and layout you may see on a home page of a website. These pages are fine for pages such as Testimonial or possibly Bio Pages.

Custom Designed Interior Pages: It would be recommend to have more of a budget for very important pages like your main services pages for instance. Although just a basic layout will still look great, with the additional budget for design time that can be put into calls-to-action, parallax background, and interactive elements to make the page more visually interesting. This extra cost could be well worth it to increase the chances that your website visitors will convert.

Logo Design Costs & Budget

If you are in need of purchasing a logo for your new company or are wanting to update your old tired one, that would factor into the over all cost. Depending on your budget and your desired use of the logo there are a couple of different approaches that you can take.

Basic Logo: You can do a very quick text-treatment only logo that will be for use on the website. There will be a little bit of a budget that will allow us to do a quick logo that would look and feel much better than just your website’s name typed out. This option is great if you just need something quick for the web.

Full Logo Package: The other option that you could do is to have a full logo package created. This option will be appropriate if you are wanting to use this logo for all of your collateral materials as well.

Home Page Slider Costs

A lot of modern web designs incorporate a slider on their home page. This feature is great for catching people’s eye and showing them quickly what the website is about. A slider will help show website visitors at a glance that they are on the right kind of website.

A Simple Slider: A quick approach to the home page slider would be to have a design with 3-4 slides that fade from one to the other. There will be little to no animation to help keep the design time down. This slider would just be JPG's that fade into each other. Although simple, this can be a great option for websites that have great product images.

A Fully Animated Slider: A second approach would be a fully animated slider. Each element of the slides can animate in and be handled separately. This is great if you really want a slick slider to show off your companies main services or products. As you can imagine this requires more hours to build out and more back and forth with your clients. Because of this, the price is higher than just a simple slider.

Photo Galleries Pricing Options

Whether you are looking for a simple photo gallery or a fully fleshed out gallery section to display all of your work, there are options for you.

A simple photo gallery: This is the more affordable option that is perfect for people would just like a a nice page of images that a user can easily step through. User will be able to click on each image and have them “lightbox” open to view at a larger size.

A full featured gallery: This is a great option if you want multiple categories within your gallery and require additional functionality. If you are a Photographer, for instance, this would be the option for you. Easily manage categories and layouts for large numbers of images on your website. Many layout options are available to meet just about any photo gallery need.

The Cost of Stock Images

It is more beneficial to have authentic original imagery to use throughout their website verses a stock image that anyone can purchase. People can pick out stock images from a mile away these days. Using your own unique images can only re-enforce your companies commitment to quality. Handling your images in this way will help ensure that your website is unique and stands out among the crowd.

That being said, stock images are used all of the time and are much better than having no images at all. There are many websites that offer affordable options and I can help point you in the right direction depending upon needs. Stock images can range from $1 to $50 each depending on the level of quality needed and its intended use.

Search Engine Optimization Considerations

On Page Optimization:  Best practices is to code your websites with SEO from the beginning. The website designer can spend the extra time needed to properly research the correct keywords for any particular page to find the keywords people are using to try to find content like yours.

Copywriting: Hiring a copywriter to interview you for the website is best. SEO copywriters can interview you to get an understanding of the image and voice you are wanting to have on your website and then produce professional copy that can be used on your website. This would mean your copy would come optimized.

Tracking: Taking the time to install website traffic and monitoring tools like Google Analytics and setup an account in Google’s Webmaster Tools. This will allow you to analyze your traffic to help with marketing as well as speed up the indexation process by submitting an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

Social Media Connection

Having a solid Social Media strategy can help drive interest and increase the viral potential for your new website. You can put into place many features to help your visitors spread the word. A few of these include:

On-site Social Media: You can implement social sharing and social following throughout your website. Having things like Facebook Like boxes and pulling in feeds from your Twitter account can help increase your social reach. You can also put in social sharing functionality to make it as easy as possible for your website visitors to share your content with all of the people they are connected with.

Social Media Account Design: The second is creating or editing social media accounts for you to help unify your branding. After you have a new web design, matching the branding across your social media channels can help keep your brand looking good no matter where your potential clients find you. Your website designer can design a Facebook banner that is inspired by our web design.

eCommerce Website Design Price

If you have a need to sell products on your website or if you need a way for people to be able to donate money to your organization we have some options to help facilitate this.

Donation Forms: Donation form options rely on tying into an existing donation system or setting up a PayPal account for you. PayPal has a very easy way to set up a donation system that will allow people to donate what they want and have it tie into your bank account. Many not-for-profit organizations go this route.

eCommerce Options: If you use PayPal, you can use their embed code to add PayPal buttons to your website. This is an affordable way if your selling needs are simple. If you are in need of something more feature-filled  I suggest using WooCommerce. This will give us an incredibly flexible eCommerce system that will allow you to manage your products from the back end, put things on sale, create coupons, export sales history, and many many more features.

Event Management Systems

If your organization has events that need to be displayed on your website there are multiple ways to put a system in place to suit your needs. Depending on the level of complexity that your event management system needs to be. Learn more about the options available below.

Simple Google Calendar Integration: If all you need is the ability to show upcoming events in an easy to manage interface we recommend tying into a Google calendar. This is a relatively affordable way to get your events online.

Full Featured Event Management: If you would like to have an event management system that will allow you to create events, deprecate available tickets after purchase and have users pay for attendance, you will have to build a fully featured system that is easy for your customers to use and easy for you to manage.

Contact Forms

Although I feel it is almost mandatory for a website to have a contact form system in place for people to get in touch with you, some clients may not need this on their website. Many people on the internet would prefer to communicate initially though email vs phone and a contact form is a great way to facilitate this.

Additional Website Costs to Consider

Web Hosting Costs: There are many different types of web hosting out there. I recommend BlueHost.

Domain Name Prices: I also suggest using a company like Bluehost to purchase your domain name. Even if you aren't ready to build your website now you should be securing a domain name as soon as possible. It is a lot harder than you would think to get the domain name you desire. If SEO is important to you it may be in your best interest to buy a domain name that includes your primary keyword. Even if Google says that they do not want keyword stuffing domain names to work, if you look at a typical search result page you will see that the practice still does work.

SSL Certificates: If you are going to be having an eCommerce enabled website and you want your customers to be checking out directly on your website then you will be needing an SSL certificate. This will make sure that the data being sent from the website to the web host will be encrypted making transactions secure.

Another reason you may want to consider getting an SSL certificate is for SEO purposes. Google is pushing very hard to make the web more secure and has even stated that they will be giving some preference to https enabled websites. You can read more about their stance on this here.

Security and Back ups: This will keep your website backed up on a daily basis and also monitor for suspicious code and vulnerabilities.

Ongoing Maintenance: After a project is complete you may want to hire your website designer for additional work, additions or maintenance.

Website Costs FAQ's

How much does it cost to hire someone to build a website?

Small website: $3000 - $5000

Ecommerce website: $5000 - $15000

High-End website: $10,000 - $30,000

How much does a website cost per month?

Shared Hosting: $10 - $100 / month

Software Updates: $85 - $300 / month

Marketing: $2,000 - $50,000 / month

How much does a high-end website cost?

Typically starts at $10,000.

Pricing varies depending on specs. As most factors relating to the cost of a web design project are based around labor and time spent, pricing can skyrocket quickly. The more time and detail that goes into a project and the more details the more money you should plan on spending.

How much should I charge for Web design and maintenance?

Step 1: Estimate the number of hours you think it will take you to complete the web project and multiply it by the hourly rate you would like to make.

Step 2: Add any hard costs such as premium themes, domain names, hosting, premium plugins, travel costs for meetings.

Step 3: Add it all up and compare it to what your research says the market can handle and how much your potential client may perceive the project to be worth

Step 4: Make sure you allow for things to go wrong, for clients to take longer than expected and for any additional profit you would hope to make to build your business

How much does a site cost?

$3,000 to $100,000 depending on specifications such as size, design requirements and functionality.

How much does it cost to build a website for a small business?

A small business website will cost you around $3,000 to $6,000 depending on the project requirements. This is a safe range for a typical 5 to 20 page website with mostly text and image-based content (little special functionality).

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