Champagne tastes on a beer budget?

You need to be realistic when creating a website as websites can get really expensive. Web developers are well paid people and their time is costly. When you contract a web company to complete a sophisticated web project it will require highly paid programmers to sit down and spend hours, possibly weeks, coding to your requirements. There is simply no way to make this a cheap process although if you can leverage code they have used before, you may be able to keep your costs down.

Keep in mind that large web-based companies will not spend a set amount of money on a website project. Rather, they will have a team of developers who are dedicated to working on their system to make changes, developments and improvements. These systems can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every year in terms of maintenance and improvements.

This does not mean that you shouldn't expect to have a great website built for your company at a reasonable price. I have seen wildly successful websites at all price points - $495 to over $100,000. I have also seen abject failures that blew well over $100,000.

You need to approach your web developer with a clear idea of what you want to achieve. You then need to have a realistic plan on how you will afford ongoing changes to your website. Accept that you will need to make changes to your website, regardless of how well you have planned your project.