05 Feb How Much Does Web Design Cost? – 2018
This question, in and of its self is relatively impossible to answer. It is is way too broad, and ignores a lot of the under the hood features that professional web designers and digital agencies bring to the table on website design projects. I can, however, give you you some guidance on web design costs that will help to fill in the blanks and make the process of choosing a marketing agency or web designer much easier. Keep in mind that the process isn’t cheap, and there is a lot of thought that goes into how your prospective visitors will use the web design, and how to keep them coming back until they convert into customers and brand evangelists.
How Do Web Design Agencies Price Their Services?
The most effective way that digital agencies can determine website design pricing is to fully understand your project. That means that we ask a lot of hard questions about your goals, plans, challenges and budgets. Initially, this can be a bit off-putting, but realize that these tough questions are necessary to get to the heart of the reason to build the new website and what needs to be included in the plans.
Once we have a good idea of the scope of the challenge, then web designers can really start to plan out all of the pages and features that should be included in the project and estimate out the number of hours that are attached to each element of the website.
And, as you probably expected you can multiply the number of hours by an hourly rate that the website developer has set to cover their costs plus a modest profit.
How Does Cost Relate to Size and Type of Website?
All of our web designs are developed to be mobile-friendly. They also come with a content management system (CMS) so that clients can update content themselves as the need arises. Estimated website design costs includes hours for strategy, design, programming of pages and features, testing, user testing, search engine optimization and client training.
Simple Informational Website
These websites are for smaller businesses, and typically are fairly simple.
- 4-8 pages
- Social Media Feeds
- Contact Form
- News / Blog Area
- A few features such as image galleries, calendars or slideshows.
Typical website design pricing can range from $2,000 to $5,000
Medium Sized Informational Website
This size of site builds on the first option with additional sub-pages, typically expanded under the Products or Services pages or Company pages.
- 25-75 pages
- Social Media Feeds
- Contact Form
- News / Blog Area
- Client Resources
- A few features such as image galleries, calendars or slideshows.
Typical website design cost can range from $5,000 to $15,000
Large Informational Website
This size of site builds on the second option with additional sub-pages, typically expanded under the Products or Services pages or Company pages, and also some feature expansions.
- 100-1000 pages
- Social Media Feeds
- Contact Form
- News / Blog Area
- Media Center
- Client Resources
- More features such as image galleries, calendars or slideshows.
Typical website design pricing can range from $20,000 to $100,000.
Small E-Commerce Website
A smaller ecommerce website is usually fairly straightforward in what it is selling. We don’t have a ton of strange options and also have less than 1000 items in the system.
We oftentimes include some plug-ins or features to help manage accounting, or specialized systems for selling and scheduling training classes or events.
Typical pricing can range from $4,000 to $10,000.
Large E-commerce Website
The larger ecommerce websites really bring into play a lot of items, options and features. We will be able to spend a lot more time on conversion optimization, upselling, cross selling and usually maintain a product database in another system with data updates online on a set schedule.
Typical pricing can range from $25,000 to $200,000.
What Should I Be Spending On Marketing?
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending about 7 % to 8 % of your gross revenue for marketing and advertising if you’re doing less than $5 million a year in sales and your net profit margin (after all expenses) is in the 10 % to 12 % range (Up to $400,000.00). Some marketing experts advise that start-up and small businesses usually allocate between 2 and 3 % of revenue for marketing and advertising, and up to 20 % if you’re in a competitive industry. Still other marketing experts guide for a range between 1 % and 10 %, and even more depending on how long you’ve been in business, local or regional competitive activity and what you can afford. I typically advise that small and medium businesses plan to spend 3 % to 4 % of their gross sales for marketing and advertising to aggressively pursue their goals.
The best way to determine your marketing budget for your company is to have a frank discussion between the marketing and sales departments. Sales should know how many customers that they have to convert to make their quotas each month. You can extrapolate from that customer number to find the number of leads that need to be delivered to the sales department each month. After learning the number of leads needed, the marketing department should be able to determine how many website visits are needed to meet the number of leads. The marketing budget should be set to give them enough of a budget to achieve that number of website visits and leads.
Lifecycle of a Website
The biggest quandry for most companies is how to plan for their marketing budgets when you a website that needs to be replaced.
When you keep in mind that the lifecycle for a typical website is about 4 years, that helps when it comes time to budget in funds a few years down the road.
You should also consider Growth Driven Design for your website to maintain it at an optimum level with optimization work occuring regularly throughout the life of the website.
When you look at a build your own website solution in comparison to using a digital agency, be sure to think about all the work that a mass market solution can not bring to the table in the way of search engine optimization and visitor conversion knowledge. When you open a can and out pops a website, it probably isn’t the best solution for your business. This is your one chance to reach out to your customers, make it count!
For more informations on how to hire the right web developer for your project, check out: