What does the cost of a website design depend on?
Websites can be very varied. Generally, the following types of factors decide the cost a website:
BASIC REQUIREMENTS
1) The number of distinct page design types that will be required. For instance, the homepage, the products page, the services page, the customers page, the company page and the contact page may have different designs. That would count as 6 page layouts.
2) The number of actual pages to created. For instance if there is a site (with the six layouts mentioned above) that has say 10 pages for products, 6 pages for services and 8 pages for customers, with the rest being only single pages. Then the total pages will count as an approximately 30 page site.
3) The kind of content that needs to be placed on the website: simple text and imagesonly, Adobe Flash content, static video, streaming video, podcasts etc.
4) The programming pieces required. For instance:
- User Regsitration and Limiting Access
- Newsletters
- Contact Forms
- Blogs
- Discussion Forums and Wikis
- Support through online chat
- Protected or Open Guestbooks
- etc
ADVANCED REQUIREMENTS
5) Electronic Commerce (or EPayment) requirements which can range from the simplest to the most complex:
- Simple Paypal style interfaces - for startup merchants with a few products
- Complete Shopfront - for established merchants with good bent or marketing and sales (vouchers, discounts, old customer campaigns etc)
- Complete EMall (with many shopfronts) - for the largest hosting providers or for electronic subletting
6) Custom programming required. For instance a requirement may be to show some imaging of a dress or a hairstyle on a person. Or a requirement may be to show a 10% preview/sample of a song or video. Or pull out some data based on a certain search criterion from a database.
Before talking to a web designer it would be good if you gave a good thought to what you want to put on your website based on the above factors (and more if required). At least have an idea of the ”basic” requirements. This cystallizing of your thought makes it much easier for the web designers to give you a logical estimate of the cost. It also makes it much easier for you to compare the prices from different vendors.
Happy website creating !!