Basic Website – $1,500 – $2,000

A basic designed website, acts primarily as an online brochure, establishing a necessary presence online to answer your customers’ questions “do you exist?”, “are you professional?” and “what do you do?”

A basic website can be done for a mere market average of $2000. This website will not allow you to interact with your audience (social networking, blog), transact business directly through your site (ecommerce), or enable you to manipulate and update the pages and content within your site without hiring a web programmer/designer to do it for you (Content Management System does enable this for more $$$).

A basic website site will serve to help brand and market your company, showcase your products and services and inspire sales as a lead generating tool.  Unfortunately, the design of your website will be templated at such low costs. This means that your site probably mirrors that of other sites on the web.

With our firm, these sites will be CSS and HTML Coded to allow your site to look the same on nearly every computer/device and will be Search Engine Optimised (SEO) for greater natural search engine ranking success. But not all firms code the same and have SEO as a top priority. Also, web analytics are provided with every site we build to track and ensure your web success.

Custom Website $2,000-$3,000

Depending on the level of aesthetic design that is requested Content Management System (CMS) websites will run at a market average of $2500. These websites are created with both functionality and design in mind, as you will receive both custom art design and the ability to manage and update all content, images, and text contained within the pages of your site (infinite number of pages possible). With a CMS capable website, your site will have endless possibilities as a pluggable, flexible web application capable of adding additional features as you desire.

These websites are built with the idea that you will have a significant number of changes, additions or updates to be made to your site in the near future. Instead of being charged hourly rates to make such changes, a CMS system enables you to do a majority of the basic additions without prior coding or web designing knowledge.  Social interactivity with your site visitors is possible with a site of this caliber, as a BLOG will be present within your site enabling you to place posts of content that you believe is relevant and desired by your audience.

Your audience can choose to respond to your blog posts and each others comments allowing for 2 dimensional interaction between you, your audience, and within your audience.  Some ecommerce and real state listing sites can be created within this price range depending upon level of functionality and design.

Also, sites of this calibre have varying prices with regard to design elements. These sites do have custom design work, but more expensive elements like Flash Art creation will affect pricing.  Again, with our firm, these sites will be CSS and XHTML Coded to allow your site to look the same on nearly every computer and will also be Search Engine Optimised (SEO) for greater natural search engine ranking success.

But not all firms code the same and have SEO as a top priority. Also, web analytics are provided with every site we build to track and ensure your web success.

Ecommerce Platform $3,000-$6,000

If you are looking for advance functionality including social networking, blogging, ecommerce, or any other web application topped off with the markets leading design elements, you should expect to pay a bit more. Actually, just looking at more sophisticated projects you’ll incur a higher fee as there are only a limited number of talented people (and reliable companies) that can do this kind of work – and they typically charge a premium.

Like I said before, some ecommerce and web applications can be created for less, while most successful ventures are created for much more.  Sites that have fallen in this price range can be viewed on our Media Junkies Portfolio.  A site within this price range may be built and hand coded from scratch – and in all cases will require extreme customisation – and coordinating various technologies in order to work with your company or infrastructure.

That means your site is unlike any other and requires the attention and expertise of an experienced web application developer(s) and web site designer(s). A site that falls into this category requires weeks of analysis, research, consulting, database design and implementation, software development and integration, site quality assurance and testing.

The Bottom Line or But I can Get it Cheaper Elsewhere

You’re right, and I know a number of our own clients have been able to create great sites at a fraction of the above pricing however, and I can’t stress this enough elements were left out – and future support was non-existent. I can’t tell you how many meetings we’ve been in where company owners have said – our web guy was great, but then he disappeared. I’ve repeated this for the last 5 years. I still have organisations that I’ve talked to over the years, explained this, they agree, but then they use another company to be burned over-and-over again.

Too often us web folks are kind, caring people, who are new to business and associate charging people for work with stealing – so we charge too little (we did it at one point). Unfortunately that creates an eco-system where no one is accountable and – eventually – there’s no one there to pick up the phone or answer an email when shit hits the fan. And believe me, eventually, the shit always hits the fan.

Not to mention there are literally hundreds of tiny steps that you – as the purchaser or client – will never know that need to be done. Making sure analytics code is correctly installed, making sure goal tracking is setup, submitting the site to webmaster tools, etc. and if these aren’t done you are receiving a sub-par product (with potentially sub-par marketing results – learn more about your sites coding and its effect on your organisations overall marketing) and if they are done, even the simplest site will still take many hours to fully setup.

The bottom line is, like in many industries (although let’s face it this isn’t always the case) web design and development is definitely an area where you get what you pay for.