Why you need your own website.

You’ve decided that your business needs to launch a new website. The next logical step is to figure out how much does a website cost, find the best developer and strike a deal. It should be a straightforward process but web design pricing and finding the right studio is one of the biggest and most stressful challenges a company can face.

Once you start pricing websites online with different design studios, you’ll soon realize that it’s extremely difficult to get a straight answer for the cost of a web design project. First, studios will want to speak with you on the phone. Once you spend an hour with every studio, you’ll have a range of different estimates lined up.

The price will vary so much that you might begin to imagine some design studios in ski masks committing online daylight robbery, while others are just too good to be true.

And if you make the mistake of posting your web design project on a freelance bidding website, then expect 60-100 spammy responses with a price tag starting from $100 for any given project.

You’ll soon realize that without the technical experience needed, trying to find reasonable web design pricing is like walking through a minefield. You’ll be faced with a range of problems that will make it difficult to build the right kind of site on a budget that works for your business:

• There is a lot of options that you didn’t even know exist
• Many design studios will say they can do everything
• You can’t filter unqualified developers
• Many studios are trying to sell additional services you don’t need
• The estimates of different companies vary, sometimes by x50 times
• You can’t tell whether the price is fair
• You can’t plan your budget

Is there a way to estimate the cost of website without having technical expertise?

Yes. But you need to get your hands dirty.

Compare it to building a house. If you want to build a house, you need to dive in and explore the available options, benefits, and drawbacks of different methods and materials, possible pitfalls, and only then can you make a well-informed decision.

The same goes for web design and development. There is no other way than setting apart a day or two and going through all the technical terms, available options, estimates and tricks to the trade that are available across the internet.

Getting your Hands Dirty (or How to Get a Fair Price)

To get a fair price, you need to:

• Know what exactly you want
• Evaluate the website design cost by yourself
• Get in touch with the right web design firms or individual developers

To do that, you have to educate yourself on the following topics :

• Components of web design and development (to understand the technical complexity of your project)
• Available options (hint: there are more than you think)
• Different levels of agency expertise (to understand the creative complexity of your project)
• Common pitfalls of cost estimates (in order to avoid them)
• How to compose an RFP (request for proposal)
• Web design prices around the world
• Ins and outs of outsourcing to other regions in the world (in order to get the best deal)

The good news is that I’ve put together all of the above in a single article.

For the last 7 years, I have worked in different fields of web development and headhunting. Starting as a software developer, I shifted to marketing, then sales, then project management and ended up in a strategic position. I am going to use all of my experience to help you make an informed decision before contracting a design studio for your new site.

Why Estimating the Cost for a Website is so Difficult

There are three main reasons that makes pricing a web site so difficult:

• Every project is unique in some way
• The scope of work may change
• Unqualified developers in the market

Let’s consider each of these factors in detail.

1. Every web project is unique in a few ways. The clients will want their website to stand out from the crowd, which means that they want to have a unique design. A design that no-one has drawn before. Uniqueness is a result of creative thinking, and this process is unpredictable by definition. It is also hard to set clear expectations for creativity and evaluate the results. That is why you have to choose a great agency, not just a good one.

2. The project requirements may change. For example, when the agency is conducting market research, it may come up with ideas that can significantly increase the website effectiveness but extend the scope of work as well.

There are three approaches for dealing with this kind of uncertainty :

A) Get a fixed-price quotation

The right and the hardest way. That means, that the agency is projecting the website, creates the website structure, wireframe prototype, composes a list of features and designs the high-level software architecture. It takes time and costs money. But as a result, you can get a fixed-price estimate and see what your project will look like before you build it. We recommend taking on this approach for most of people looking to create a new website.

Consider an analogy with the real estate industry. If you come to a real estate developer and ask ‘how much would it cost to build a house of 2 floors 5 rooms each’, his answer, will be probably ‘I do not know’. Because first you need to go to an architect and create a plan, which can be then estimated. Of course, you tell the architect what your budget is but you don’t know the real price until the plan is ready.

Though, this approach requires a certain level of trust. Clients will usually require at least a rough estimate before making a deal, and tend to work with agencies that can talk numbers from the first call. So this approach is often used in combination with the approaches below or is completely amended in their favor.

B) Gather visual references and list of features, give a rough estimate

This is how most agencies work. You are just providing them with a list of pages and features you need, and some examples of websites you like. They get back to you with questions, and after a few iterations, you will receive the web design price estimate.

C) Decide upon your budget, and see what you can get

This is a way to go if you don’t know exactly what you want on the website, or you want to rely on the agency’s expertise and see what they can propose. You define your budget and ask them to design a website that matches what you are willing to pay. This is usually a good approach for clients who want to put together an animated promotional website (example).

3. Vast amount of unqualified developers. There are plenty of web design firms that aren’t getting much work and are ready to get on anything for a very low price. Though there might be some rising stars among them, for the most part, there is a very good reason why they don’t have many clients: bad reputation.

The other type of studio that is eager to go after is easy money, are the ones that send a high estimate at first and then cut the price in half when you begin to negotiate. This is a clear warning sign that the company wants to get as much money from you as possible and is not really on your side. So try to negotiate a bit and see if their estimates are well grounded, or they are just taking you for a ride.