Web Design

HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST?

I get asked this question often and it's quite normal that people outside of the online business sphere might wonder how much a web design project costs. This article will attempt to answer this question which may at first appear simple but includes many aspects that need to be addressed in order to present a clear answer.

A WEBSITE CAN COSTS AS MUCH AS A DREAM VACATION, OR AS LITTLE AS A GOOD MEAL!

This is often the shortest answer I can give to avoid getting into a long explanation on the points to consider in determining the cost of a website. I like to make this comparison between the cost of a website and the cost of a dream vacation because you need to factor in all the different options you want, plus the services you expect once the site is delivered. As you can imagine, a website can cost $300 or $20,000 depending on who builds it and how it is built..

HOW CAN YOU CALCULATE THE COST OF A WEBSITE?

For an immediate and direct answer: one cannot say that a website costs $300 or $1000, even if it is designed by your cousin, your best friend or an independent agency.

A basic site consisting of 5 pages (home, about, service 1, service 2, contact), in both French and English, without any special features, takes about 15 hours for the design (if you want a custom-made site), 5-6 hours to integrate page content, 6-7 hours for programming and module integration, and 4-5 hours for project management (the back and forth between you and the company designing the). We therefore arrive at roughly 24 to 32 hours to create a website. I effectively calculated a minimum time to allow for a floor price.

Now that we have a floor price for a basic site, you need to know the hourly rate charged by your website design company. Once again, we are going to look at the average for the web industry in Quebec, which falls between $50 (often for self-employed people just starting out or with an aggressive pricing policy) and $100 an hour (for slightly greedier agencies). This gives us an average price between $1,200 (24 x $50/hour) – $1,600 (32 x $ 50/hour) and $2,400 (24 x $100/hour) – $3200 (32 x $100/hour). Don’t forget that we are talking about a basic site.

As you can see, prices tend to vary and unfortunately the quality will often vary as well. However, don’t default to the idea that paying more will always give you a higher quality site, this is not necessarily true. Please keep in mind that web designers are free to arbitrarily set their own pricing, there is no regulation for this, therefore price ranges will vary depending on your designer.