The original question was regarding general website design pricing and costs. What is a good price for website design? How much should website design cost? What are the factors involved in website design pricing?
A Good Price for Website Design Depends on Many Factors:
Most people are obviously not professional website designers so they only see the front end visual look of website design and usually do not think about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – getting high search engine rankings for their website. The first priority should be Search Engine Ranking, then visual appearance. Why is high search engine ranking important? Because you could have an awesome website visually, but if it ranks on page 100 of the search engines then only you will get to enjoy it unless you are sending direct links to people to come visit your website.
Website Design Pricing Factors
1) How much of the work are you willing to do? – If you are going to do your own original content copywriting then that would lower the price of the website design.
2) Do you already know the design concept and layout that you want? – If you already know the graphic design concept that you want then that will lower the price of the website design.
3) Will you do the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) yourself? – If you offer to do your own Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that will lower the price of the website design.
4) Will you maintain your website on an ongoing basis? – If you are willing to manage your website then that will lower the price of website design. Also if you are providing your own web hosting that will lower the price of website design.
I see that someone else suggested that you should choose a CMS website platform. I totally agree both personally and professionally. WordPress is currently ranked as the #1 open source CMS website platform so it’s a no brainer on which CMS platform to choose. I am a professional website designer among other things and one of the reasons I build most of my websites on the WordPress CMS platform is because once I’m done with the visual stuff and coding I can hand the website over to the owner and they can handle everything they need to do with their website without any further assistance from me.
So the bottom line is if you are willing to do some of the work yourself and manage your own website, then you should be able to get a much cheaper website design price.
Cost for a WordPress website if you do all of the work yourself = $70 a year for web hosting, $10 a year to buy your website domain name, WordPress itself does not cost anything = FREE!, WordPress Themes are FREE! So the do it yourself WordPress way will cost you less than $100. Expect to spend at least a minimum of 100 hours of your time to get the site up and running to a point where it is visually where you want it and actually starting to perform well in the search engine rankings.
Paying Someone Else To Do The Time Consuming Website Design Work
If you want someone else to customize a WordPress Theme for you (visual graphic stuff or coding) that price will cost you anywhere from $100-$300.
If you want someone to write your original content copywriting that price should cost around $100-$200 a page.
If you want someone to SEO your web pages that price should costs about $100 per page.
* These are middle market or somewhere in the middle prices anyway for a professional.
* More expensive website designs include embedded Flash. Flash AS3 coding can be very time consuming compared to HTML and PHP coding so you will end up paying a lot more if Flash is involved in the website design.
If you get an honest professional website designer you should ask to get a break down on the hours of each part of the website design process. I can personally design and configure a WordPress website in about 10 hours – that’s the easy part and the least time consuming part of website design. Original copywriting requires research and SEO requires research and of course actually doing both of those things takes a lot of time. A typical 10 page website fully SEO’d and all original copywriting takes me around 10 days or 100 hours – that includes all the bells and whistles visually and backend coding as well as writing and SEO. So if you do the math and you’re paying the website designer to do all the work at let’s say $10 an hour, then that would be $1,000. This is for a “real” website that has been completely done for you not a pretty design graphic with no substance that you will find on page 10 of Google. More realistically I would expect that a pro would charge minimum $25 an hour. Once again if you are going to do the bulk of the work after the website is designed then the cost could then be as low as just $250 for just the actual website design itself (10 hours x $25 an hour).
Anyway samples of the websites I have designed can be found on my website. They range in price from a $200 do it yourself WordPress websites to a $5,000 dollar website – Vision Sign – the website design cost is about $1,500 in hours, the rest of the price is the ongoing work done on that website. If you just need a personal website or a just for fun website you can get a free site at WordPress.com.
Hope this info was helpful.
Tags: Website Design Cost Factors, Website Design Pricing Factors
Categories: Wordpress Tips - Tricks - Fixes