How much should a website cost you?

by Khan Babar Consultant

Thinking of building a website for your company? Not sure how much its going to cost? You ask a few people and they all give you a different answer. You are confused. That is to be expected as there is no simple answer. A website can cost you from $500 to $50,000. Let's get you educated a little so you can talk to a web developer armed with a little better knowledge.

The number 1 thing you need to know is: it really depends on what your site is about, what it does and how it looks. Mobile friendly websites with custom, modern design cost a lot more than the average blog. In this article, we’ll give you an overall idea of the cost, but by all means, we encourage you to double check the cost depending on the site you want with a web developer.

Here are main thing you need to include in your budget:

1. Domain – not expensive

2. Hosting – not expensive

3. Design – could be expensive

4. Development/ website builder and maintenance – could be expensive

5. Content & SEO – it's a long term activity. Keep it separate from web development.

Again, we would like to stress that the cost of building a website boils down to four points:

Which of these resources do you have at your disposal? Lacking one or two does not mean that you cannot have a website. You can either compensate one for the other or in the case of design/tech skills you can outsource the website building to professionals.

You can choose to buy a domain and learn how to design and setup the website yourself, which will probably take quite some time. In most cases, it is much more cost effective to get help from professionals.

You can either build parts of it by yourself, do it all on your own or have developers do all the work. Developers can build the website from scratch without using any particular website building software. Or, you create the site on WordPress but you need to know your way around the platform if you are to customize it to your needs and preferences. Alternately, website builders such as Wix, Squarespace and Weebly are drag and drop builders so you can assemble a website with minimal technical knowledge. It will still require time though.

Want to know more? There is a much more detailed article on this subject at http://bit.ly/costs-how-much1

Good Luck!