How much does a website cost?
A small business owner friend of mine is looking at building a website, essentially a brochure website made up of 8 pages. He has had quotes from $2000 – $24000 which I am sure you will agree is a huge range. The latest quote is for $2000 but only includes the technical software setup of a website. In order to help him qualify the costs for building a simple website I sent him the following information with key tasks plus man hours.
1. Define what the website is trying to achieve – 4-8 hours
2. Purchase the domain name (company.com, company.co.nz, company.com.au etc) and sort out routing tables: 1 hour
3. Purchase one years hosting: 30 mins ($120-200 per year ongoing costs)
4. Design logo and colour schemes: 4 hours
5. Design site including keywords and SEO: 4-8 hours
6. Review design etc: 0 – 12 hours
7. Install, configure, plugins, deploy design etc with Joomla: 2-4 hours
8. Write the content (Harder than you think): 4-12 hours
9. Build links back to site: 2 hours
10. Setup Analytics: 1 hour
11. Build roadmap, version 1, version 2, version 3 etc
Basically the costs would be in the region of:
Labour: $2000
Hosting: $180
Domains: $80
Total: $2260
Not a bad price for a professionally designed website.
We could also add in email, collaboration, wikis, forums, documents but these capabilities would be part of the roadmap and cost a bit more but no more than $60 per user.
The most important aspect of a website project is understanding why the client wants/needs a website. Some typical reasons;
“to generate more leads”
“to inhance the company’s reputation”
“to sell more”
I am a bit of a slave driver and I like the x10 (times ten) factor. The x10 factor says for every dollar I invest in lead / reputation generation I expect ten dollars worth back.
If we think of our website costs above in order to invest $2000 in a website the return should be $20000. If the marketing object is to increase sales then we would expect the website to deliver an additional $20k of sales. In order to prove that the website delivers this value we need the customer to be focused on collecting these metrics.
