How Much Does it Cost to Build a Website?

In This Guide: How to afford the website you want. The cost of making a website is balanced between these three things: the experience level of the website designer, the type of website you envision and how much you are willing to pay for the website services.
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  • Copyright 2009 Greg Sidelnikov. Please do not reproduce without my permission.

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    1. Website Design Costs are Defined by the Type of the Website you would like to Build

    Below I listed some of the common categories that are generally used to determine how much a website should cost. These are general, and not definitive prices. So, before you rush to spend a fair amount of money on developing your website, please make sure to read the How to Avoid Wasting Money Check List page full of advice on how to save money when building a website. This article outlines the common mistakes people make when they decide to make a website for no other reason other than "Just because my business needs a website". You would be surprised to know that most websites, once designed, never receive a substantial amount of traffic. Without traffic, your online business will not succeed. Learn How to Build Website Traffic. In addition, it is important to understand just what makes your website practical, effective and helpful to your business (and above all, to the visitors of your site!), I've written an article about that here.

    Making websites is not like changing car engine oil, there is simply no holy grail for determining the website construction costs. However, by using the Website Design Cost Calculator located on this website, it is possible to get an insight on general pricing of websites. Keep in mind that depending on the level of experience and the business model, the website designer of your choice will be able to quote your project individually. Some designers will charge 30% to 50% of the total price upfront. Others will not ask for a payment until you are satisfied with what they have built. Some website design companies will even provide you with financing options!

    1.1 Simple 5 page website: between $100 and $300

    If you are starting a website with a mission to show a small presentation of your skills (e.g. real estate broker, restaurant catering services, an art gallery, and so forth), your website falls into the category of simple websites that can be built relatively quick. Let's say you want to showcase your art gallery or the ideas behind your business and explain why people should contact you. A website like this could contain just 3 to 5 pages with a few images and a contact us form. Websites that cost just a few hundred dollars are usually followed by maintenance fees because you will eventually want to change things like text or pictures.

    1.2 Average-size 25 page website: $500 to $1,000

    If you are looking to create a website containing 10, 25 or 50 pages, consider the possibility of spending a decent amount of money. The site content is the information about your business, articles or details on the subjects chosen by you. This content must be prepared and presented by you to the person or the company who will design your website. Some common ways to identify the price of a website is by how many pages it contains. In which case, your website designer will tell you how much he or she charges per page in addition to the basic development costs.

    1.3 Flash-based website: about $1,500 and up

    If you are looking to build something more advanced than the average website, for example: a website that uses Flash graphics, picture galleries, animations, fade-in and fade-out effects applied to pictures to create pretty slideshows, be prepared to spend more money. But keep in mind that Flash design is often less expensive than many Website Development jobs that require writing code in a programming language. Although it is not uncommon for flash-based websites pricing to start around $2,000, it is sometimes possible to negotiate the price with the designer. Of course, the more experience a Flash designer has, the more money they will want to charge for their labor.

    Flash-based websites come in at least two flavors. You can have the entire website designed using Flash technologies. But it is also not at all uncommon to have only certain parts of the website contain flash "windows" (usually in a form of a rectangle of a specigic width and height) or areas that are capable of greater graphical sophistication than the rest of the website. If blended with creative precision, it is possible to create fun interactive websites by only using these specialized areas for Flash-based design elements.

    With the recent advances (this article was written in 2009) in web technologies it is now possible to create Flash-like websites without using Flash. Other code libraries such as jQuery or Prototype could be used to create sophisticated effects and user interfaces. Fade in, fade out and image sliding effects can also be achieved by using Dynamic HTML in cojunction with jQuery or the Javascript language. If you ever wonder if an element of a website you like is done using flash or DHTML, right click on the area of interest and see if the pop-up menu says anything about Flash Player. If it doesn't, then the area you just clicked with your mouse was not created using Flash.

    1.4 Small business website: $1,000 up to $5,000

    If your business has a small office and you are seeking help building an affordable website, you are looking at budget of one and up to five thousand dollars. If this is out of your budget, in many cases you can still have someone build a website that will cost less, but this will dependion what exactly you are looking to build. It is probably not worth spending a thousand dollars on a small website that merely outlines your business ideas and services in a simple 10-page format. On the other hand, e-commerce websites usually require more work. If you are not selling any products and your website doesn't have a lot of content, then my advice is to seek solutions from web designers who don't charge an arm and a leg.

    If you understand your competition, you will obviously want the best website on the subject of the niche that your small business focuses on. More than often website designers are not aware of the idiosyncrasies that your business entails. As a general rule, if the money being spent is of seriously considerate amount, let your website designer know about the similar websites you had seen on the Internet to avoid having made something you didn't want. After that, ask your website designers to provide you with a few rough sketches of their work before they start to work on the 5-star version of the website. Sometimes delays during the development time are inevitable. But if you give the website designer as many details about your business as possible, if you tell them about the most important information that you want to express with your business, you can definitely avoid the hassle of unnecessary delays in the future.

    1.5 Professional Website: Thousands of Dollars

    First, let's draw a line between the different types of what is considered a professional website. There are at least two types and it depends on how different people think about websites. Some people consider a professional website to be something like an upgrade to what is called a "small-business website". Other people think that the term Professional Website pertains to the fact that they are serious about the business they own. Established companies such as Nike or Adidas also consider websites that promote their products as professional websites and sometimes require developers well-versed in programming languages such as Java, PHP and Actionscript. The costs of such websites are assumed to be in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 dollars and more.

    Professional websites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube are difficult to make because they require not only to be continuously updated with new content but also to be maintained. Unfortunatelly, a website of the same scope such as these giants require an entire team of programmers and often at least one enterpreneur to start. Companies who embark on a mission to create a competitive website are usually refered to as start-up companies, or simply start-ups. The websites they create are usually funded by large-pocketed investors with initial round investment sums such as $1,000.000 (one million dollars!) Social Networking is the new industry trend and everyone wants to make their websites interactive, contain features such as user-profiles, comments, personal photo galleries, messaging and email services. It is certainly not a great idea to build a website like that by yourself without help of others. Many people sometimes think that making another YouTube is a piece of cake and they can simply go to Craig's list to find someone who can make a website like that for them... for $500 dollars! This fantastical thinking is doomed to fail. Dynamically generated pages, advanced scripts like comments, rating systems and photo galleries with tagging capabilities are usually developed by a team of professional software engineers who are paid at least five thousand dollars a month.

    2. Is There a Way to Build a Website For Free?

    Yes. But again, this depends on the type of a website you are looking to build and whether you are comfortable with ads displayed on your website. Some free hosting companies require placing advertisements on your website to help pay for the free server maintenance and bandwidth.

    2.1 Using Free Site Builders

    There are several websites that offer free website builders, also known as site creators, that become useful tools in hands of people who are willing to press a few buttons to make a simple website.

    2.2 Starting a Blog is Usually Free

    Blogs are usually created free of charge, they are provided by the numerous free blog-hosting websites. Some of the most popular ones are Blogger or LiveJournal. Blogs are often associated with expressing personal opinions and recording life's events and experiences. Unfortunatelly, they are also traditionally associated with lack of depth in published content, misinformation or simply useless space-wasters. Plenty-a-men have used blogs to create "free" website only to clutter them with mindless posts on random subjects in hopes of monetizing them with affiliate programs such as Google AdSense. Although it is possible to host a blog on a separate domain name, most of the blogs on the Internet are hosted using subdomain-level names such as thisismyblog.blogger.com. These types of names are hard to remember and are obviously not as effective at building memorable identity as actual domain names.

    2.3 Asking Someone Else For Free Hosting

    If you have a great website ideas, some people who have access to hosting servers that they own can allow you to host your website using their resources free of charge. The truth is, many hosting accounts never take full advantage of the allocated bandwidth and storage resources because some websites never become popular, and people who have a spare hosting account that was paid for will be willing to help you out. This is not a very common or wide-spread way to get a free hosting account, but it is certainly possible. Keep in mind that you can still use your own domain name. Hosting companies and the domain registration services are often not run by the same companies. You can switch hosting companies while keeping your domain name the same!

    3. Final Thoughts on the Cost of Making a Website

    The costs associated with website design are dependent on the amount of work involved in making a website that matches your vision. The value of website design can be easily determined by looking at the type of a website you are looking to construct. On the general scale, a simple website can cost anywhere from $100 to a few thousand dollars. The quality of the graphic design will play a role in determining additional website design costs. It is possible to find a website designer who will build a simple website for you containing simple images and some text across 3 or 5 separate web pages. If that's what you are looking for, then this type of job can easily be done in a matter of a few days for just a few hundred dollars. One of the favorite ballpark numbers that website designers ask for a website of that kind are in the range of $300 to $500 or slight variations. Because no website designer is the same, different people will offer various price tags for essentially making the same thing.

    Don't forget to ask your website designer for an online portfolio. If they don't have one, that means they haven't been in the business for a long time enough to bother creating a portfolio of their best work. Although it is always a great idea to get a feeling of what a website designer is capable of, don't make this a defining factor in deciding whether you want to choose them to construct your website. There are very many talented web designers who are not very good at personal presentation or simply don't feel the need to make online portfolios because they are confident that they can create any kind of website.

    4. Additional Tips on Hiring a Freelance Website Designer or a Web Design Company

    Like so many things in life, the cost of websites depends on so many different things. It is interesting to note that one of the important factors that plays a role in defining the price of your website is how much you are willing to pay for it. This is because there is no holy grail for figuring out the value of a website in all possible circumstances. What level of experience does the web designer you've hired has? Do they have experience exactly with the type of website you'd like to be developed? If you are looking to develop a website that needs shopping cart functionality, it is best to hire someone who has experience with it and doesn't just offer to use the free Zen Cart website (shopping cart software that is well-known among website deverlopers for being free, but also known for not being very intuitive or user-friendly). Different developers charge different amounts of money for the same type of websites. However, don't be alarmed! This article sheds some light on identifying realistic costs and what's involved.

    Deciding how much you are willing to pay for your website development needs is sometimes a negotiation with the person or the website design company you would like to hire. It is true that some companies and individuals underprice, or overprice the amount of money they are willing to work for. This is done in order to accommodate for the living situation of the person who will be working on your project. It is also done in order to accommodate for the costs it takes to produce a website of desired quality and functionality. But what are these costs exactly? When we go out to buy a car, the price of the car we want is pasted to the windshield of the advertised cars in the dealership's parking lot. This is of course just the starting point. Car dealers are tricky beasts, and therefore we will negotiate with them and bring the price a couple of grand down. When we go to a website designer we need to negotiate the price in the same way. The only difficulty is, that there are no visible price tags pasted onto the foreheads of website designers.

    Another interesting idea to consider is the mindset duality of people who decide to make a website. There are those who know exactly what they want their website to be, and ones who believe that the website designer should be completely responsible for the vision of the website. Considering that, allow yourself to think this question over. Do you want to be engaged in the creative process of making suggestions to the website developers you are hiring or let them do the job using their own gray matter? If the latter is your answer, in choosing the right web designer please be aware that website designers will sometimes work for less money once they begin to understand that your website will need updates in the future. Of course they will not tell you this, but once you ask them about what it would costs to change this background color, or that web link color, the "maintenance" fees start to emerge. Keep in mind that maintenance fees are usually charged after the website is complete and the client (you) is satisfied with the website, but later realizes that new changes need to be done. Believe me, after a period of time, you will want to change that logo or rephrase your product or company statement. Even Google changed their logo several times.

    Personal preference of both the clients and web developers is one thing. But another important aspect that will define the cost of creating your website is the difficulty level of your vision. What kind of technical sophistication is required for your new website idea? Will the freelancer you've hired be able to pull this of and do it right? Below we will consider a few very common types of websites and the costs associated with them.

    4.1 Is it Necessary to Have the Website Designer Register your Domain Name?

     It's not very difficult and you absolutely can and should do it yourself! Sometimes website designers rely on the fact that you may not know of the costs of a domain name and monthly hosting fees, and charge more than what it's worth. This practice is best avoided by making a decision to register your own domain name with one of the hosting companies. You see, usually hosting companies provide domain registration services together with your hosting account. I have written reviews of some of these hosting companies and they are listed right here on this website under the web hosting company reviews section. Once on the front page of a hosting company, all you need to do is fill out a form with registration details and choose a payment plan. Once your payment is processed, the company will provide you with your domain name account details, more specifically your username and password which you can use to login to your account. This information is usually sent to you by email.

    4.2 How much does a website domain name cost

    How much does domain name cost

    4.3 How much does hosting cost

    How much does hosting cost

    4.4 How much does it cost to run and maintain a website

    How much does it cost to maintain a website? How much does a website cost per month?

    5. Making a Website Yourself

    Another option to save a lot of money is to learn how to make a website yourself. Imagine how much money you could save by learning to make your own websites, not just one, but as many as you wish.

    5.1 Why Make a Website Yourself?

    If you are looking to design your own website by yourself, your design costs will be significantly reduced. Of course, the amount of time it takes to learn to build a website from scratch requires an enormous amount of patience. But so do many other things. This website is here to help you. The Getting Started series are designed to teach you the basic skills. There you will find website tutorials, and tips for choosing a domain name and hosting companies. Some general uses of common web technologies are also to be found there.

    5.2 The Myths About the Difficulty of Making Your Own Website

    Many people don't consider the possibility of making a website themeslves because they believe it is a difficult job, and that only people who understand computers can create a website with ease. People begin to learn of the proverbial web languages such as HTML and Javscript. That alone is enough to make many people shrug in fear. However, these technologies are pretty simple to learn and understand for just about anyone. If you are interested, this website offers a number of free web programming tutorials for beginners that teach basic website development and design knowledge.

    If building the website yourself is out of question for you, either due to lack of experience or lack of time on your hands, think about hiring someone else who can do it for you. This article and the other tutorials located on this website will explore both of these possibilities.

    Copyright 2009 by Greg Sidelnikov. All rights reserved.

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