How Much Should a Web Design Cost?

This is a question we get asked all the time and the simple answer is, it depends on what you want from your website.

You don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a website for it to look good but spending $250 will rarely give you a website that has a good blend of design and functionality. I always use car sales as an analogy when talking about buying websites. If you buy a 20 year old car for $500, you are buying a very cheap car and you would have very little expectation of the car lasting long, having much functionality or being very comfortable.  If you buy a Holden Barina for $14k you are buying a cheap car with limited features, but it is a good little car that will get you around town.  You know when you are buying the car that you are getting what you paid for i.e. not much more than the basics. If you buy a Holden Captiva for $40K you will get the little extras that paying slightly more gets you, such as leather seats, electric windows, six airbags instead of two etc. On the other hand if you walk into a BMW dealership and buy the top of the line M series you will get the best BMW has to offer but you will be paying for it.

Websites work exactly the same way.  If you spend $500 you will get a very basic web designthat doesn’t do much and probably looks pretty ordinary too. Spend a few thousand and you get a bit more and so on.  Just like cars, websites can cost anything from a few hundred dollars up to half a million dollars. Not only do they cost to build, they can also cost a lot to maintain. Websites such as Apple, EBay or SMH have teams of people looking after the content, design and functionality of their websites. They are constantly updating, changing the functionality and generally keeping up with the fast pace that popular websites need to run at.

You have to be realistic when shopping around for a website, as there are lots of web companies out there with lots of different prices. So when comparing quotes just follow these few tips and you will have a realistic expectation for your finished web design.

3 Web Design Tips

1. Look at the web portfolio of the company to gauge the quality of the web design you can expect. Lots of design companies have different levels of designers and senior designers will only work on the more expensive jobs. Check what sort of designer you will be getting.
2. Ask what functionality will be included in your quote. Don’t expect complex custom functionality on a cheap website- the more custom your website is, the more expensive it will be. Developers are much more expensive than designers so asking for unique functionality will always push the price up.
   
   
3. What sort of support does the company offer, do they have a dedicated support team, and can you call them? Support services cost money to offer and will mean you pay a little more for your website, but in the long run they are worth the extra as you have the assurance that someone is always there to help and offer advice.

There is no point in spending $500 on a website and then being disappointed that you don’t have a website that looks and functions like eBay. In the same way you can pay $20k and still not get eBay, but as long as you have had a realistic conversation with your web company about what you can expect at your budget you will be happy with the result as you know what you are buying.

Slightly Revised: 12/06/2012