How much does web design cost?

BAD design costs you more than hiring a professional. That cheap $200 designer sounds good, but they’re costing you much more than you probably realise. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression on your clients or customers — people judge you. If you present yourself well, they’ll trust you. However, if your marketing looks amateurish, you’ll send them running.

Your customers will make an instant impression of what you’re like to do business with based on your appearance and what its like to first interact with you. This means having a professional website is absolutely critical.

  • A simple website will typically start from £400 / $750.
  • A fully custom website integrating a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla will typically start from £1,000 / $1,500.
  • A complete e-commerce solution integrating merchant gateways, payment processing, and stock control will typically start from £2,000 / $3,000.

These are rates for SMEs. Individuals can be charged less, and we tend to do special rates for new business start-ups.

“ Why so much money? Building a website isn’t hard and doesn’t take long! ”

When you look at a website, you’re only seeing the final product, when in truth hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours have been poured into getting to that step.

When a business is looking for a professional online presence, this is the process from our designer perspective:

  1. Do research on the client: what it does, location(s), industry, market demographics
  2. Research competitors: website designs, what they offer that the client doesn’t, what they’re lacking, how they’re leveraging their strengths
  3. Discuss client’s wishes and desires: what do they aim to achieve with the website, looks and styles they like, branding considerations
  4. Sketch and storyboard potential site designs, and discuss with the client until settling on a final idea
  5. Building a realistic mockup of the design for accurate visualisation
  6. Getting client feedback, tweaking and adapting the mockup until ideal
  7. Building the underlying framework for the website, designing database structure and website functionality
  8. Converting the mockup to a live, useable example
  9. Tweaking and adapting further as the client requests after trying out the live example
  10. Putting together the fully operational website, including database skeletons
  11. Integrating and testing any payment gateways and external APIs
  12. Bruteforce testing the entire website: intentionally trying to crash, glitch or maliciously attack the website to find and secure any vulnerabilities
  13. Uploading, installing and configuring the website in a live production environment ready for public use
  14. Final checks and tweaks as necessary
  15. Tutoring the client and any staff as necessary about how to administrate the website
  16. Offer ongoing technical support as needed

Suddenly that $8,500 price tag seems quite minor when accounting for the months of research, design and development that can go into building a professional website.

“ But I can get a website made really cheap! ”

I’m sure thats true. Hobbyist designers and students who don’t really have experience will all offer super low prices.

The issue is, the rates a professional charges cover value, not price. You’re paying to get the years of critical experience, expertise and wisdom that only a professional designer can offer.

For a business, your website is a storefront, the sales rep, the face of the company. Image is everything, as it is the only way for a customer to gauge your trustworthiness in lieu of a physical presence.

Do you really want to entrust your public image to that cheap, amateur designer?

“ This is crazy, I can learn to do this myself! ”

Thats very true. If you have the luxuries of time and money, you can spend 3-5 years studying web design principles, Photoshop/Fireworks design compositing, XHTML and CSS standards, typography, useability design, search engine optimisation, cross-browser and cross-OS testing, developing for mobile devices, a full development language such as PHP or .NET, database design and best practices, web security, Apache configuration, colour theory, stock sourcing, illustration, SSL certification, Linux setup and configuration, user interface design and interaction, asynchronous Javascript and XML…

In the real world, businesses are busy. They don’t have the time to set aside thousands of hours to learn all the skills a professional designer has.

You wouldn’t try to take on legal paperwork yourself — you’d take it to a lawyer, because doing it yourself, while cheaper, carries all sorts of risks you wouldn’t even know about. The same applies to all careers with specialist skills that take years to learn, including web design.

“ Alright… I want to know more. How can I contact you? ”

You can get in touch via my web design studio, BreezeBlue, or contact me directly through this page.