Thursday, January 21, 2010

The True Costs Of Web Design

Tweet

Most people do not know much about how much a website is worth, or better yet how much it costs to build a website. After all, there is no official price standard to follow; the values of digital goods are still somewhat hard for people to grasp in this case. There are many ways to bill for a website: by hour, project, module, etc…. but more often than not, these pricing schemes are designed to hide the real costs involve. So I am going to try to break down the different aspects of web design and their worth.

1. Consultation

Some web design agencies charge you for talking with a representative and further ironing out the idea that you have for the website. A detailed consultation session could help you understand all of the moving pieces that are involved with web design and give you a more accurate quote. However, unless your website is quite complex, consultation should be part of the project price.

2. Look And Feel

The way the website looks visually is in large part due to the efforts of the graphic designer. The graphic designer takes your vision and creates a template of what your website will look like. The template does not have any real content: they design the visuals and the user experience of the site. The template phase can be as cheap as $100 for a template at templatemonster.com or as expensive as thousands of dollars for a large custom template.

3. Implementation Of Content

The template by itself is not the website: more often than not, the template must be further worked on before it can go live. The site is populated with real textual, graphical, and dynamic content using a variety of languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Adobe Flash and Silverlight. This phase is typically a straightforward process unless advanced animation effects are required, which would require its own consultation and look and feel phase. The cost of this phase depends largely on the template discussed in the look and feel phase, and how many times you change your mind. Because this part of the process essentially consist of the bulk of the coding on the website, this part of the website can vary from a couple of hundred bucks for pre-made websites to even the tens of thousands for custom systems.

4. Backend Services

Most web 2.0 sites also need to be connected to backend services that enable your site to do more than load web pages. If you opt to have your website powered by a CMS (Content Management System), then you will be able to edit your website without a web developer. The CMS hosts a backend where you can log in and add content that is automatically incorporated into the site. CMS implementations can run from low four figures to beyond depending on the services you want on your site. Services like e-commerce, databases, search capabilities, blogs, forums, user login, and protected areas are all considered additional modules that will also run up the bill, so be sure you really need those services as you proceed.

5. Hosting And Maintenance

Maintenance packages ensure that your site runs continuously and is updated with the latest security updates, so unless your site is very simple, it is a good idea to purchase maintenance for your site. Hosting is required to have your site up on the Internet in the first place. Hosting and maintenance can run you from $10 to hundreds of dollars a month depending on the complexity of your website.

So roughly every website process can be broken down into these five phases. Understanding the costs of web design helps you ask the right questions and provide the most helpful input to ensure the success of your website.

<< Back to main