Recently I have read a lot of "mid-size business'" receiving new website quotes at $1Million+.
Having worked on extremely large enterprise websites before on a team of thirty - let's break down a bit of the cost.
Full-time: Four Project Managers, Two Leads, Two Designers, A Network Engineer, A MySQL person, and twenty Developers.
Requirements: Ten thousand pages, eighteen month lead-time.
If each page takes two and one half hours to be completed by the Developers then each Developer will work six months, or twelve hundred and fifty billable hours to complete the project notwithstanding set-backs or the other ten on the team who keep the skids greased and add an additional 50-300% to final cost.
With each Developer salaried at one hundred and twenty-four thousand and eight hundred dollars this places the Development cost at one million two hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars. An additional 50-300% cost introduces a new range of one million eight hundred and seventy-two thousand to one point eight million to three point seven million dollars.
I even read an Attorney lamenting about their two hundred and fifty man firm spending six million dollars on their new website.
Perhaps the global markets are so severely wounded that the professionals who first sustained the industry and numbered in the millions were economically tossed out due to such a lower economic trajectory which can no longer adequately replenish a complex of industry comforts like the world's best tech industry full of morally-driven people.
For the rest of us who need websites to promote our self or our small business the number of pages could be five or fifteen hundred for a larger online store; albeit, monotonous additions or automated insertions of product pages. The cost here should range from three hundred dollars to ninety thousand dollars with the bell curve somewhere under thirty-five hundred dollars for more amateur work and eleven thousand for more skilled work.
If someone were to approach me wanting a Wordpress blog on their own domain, first I would tell them to use Ghost blog instead, second I would only charge them three hundred dollars to pay for the thirty minutes of work to purchase a domain and hosting on epik.com, add a website firewall with Cloudflare, install and configure their blog and then hand the website over to them to begin blogging. For someone who wants Wordpress for their business and needs five extra customized pages then six thousand is a very nominal rate for the hours that made reproducing good website results possible.
Each additional page required after the total cost of a five page website should cost two hundred and fifty dollars; e.g., thirty final pages totalling twelve thousand plus dollars; or, otherwise seventy-five dollars per product page; e.g., one hundred and twelve thousand additional dollars for fifteen hundred products.
The website designer should assist whoever is interested in ways to cut money since their job is inherenty instructive to safeguard their client's best interests. Perhaps the owner wants to be shown how to add ten product pages so they can call the website complete – pay for the website at ten product pages – and then go on to add the fifteen hundred products their self. This means instead of the client paying one hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a website they pay seven thousand dollars out-of-pocket and then add the products their self. Sometimes the client calls and needs a few hours of help – this will be billable "General" hours from the website designer or two hundred dollars per hour.
To reiterate – if all I am doing is securing the domain and quickly installing a platform then the cost for a new website build with the best modern technology is extremely low: even three hundred dollars. How many of you have I sold? Contact martyr.dev to be your website designer today.
If the website involves three hours per page then those hours must be paid for as there are millions of people in the world ready to fill my time and pockets for focusing on building their products and writing their stories.
Writing or ghost-writing will cost three hundred to twelve hundred dollars per hour depending on the project. A fifteen hundred word article that took four hours to complete costs twelve hundred to forty-eight hundred dollars.
Nameless writers who churn out blog junk that spams the search engines with unoriginal content can cost five to twenty dollars per article. Who really cares to sabotage their brand or intellect in that way?
Logos and branding are another area of website design that can drive the cost into the additional tens of millions of dollars. The website designer should agree with the small business owner on the number of hours worked for the task and the total number of assets to be delivered to fully satisfy the client: they will be fully aware of what they cannot afford and the standard or quality they receive with the dollars they spend.
What does a brand or logo cost?
Three hundred dollars? Free? Quite a bit if the timing is like selling water in a desert. There are large, medium, icon, browser icon, night version, day version, background, transparent background, grayscale, color, print materials, multiple vector versions, animations, video insertions, video themes, video introductions and or credits sections, outdoor signage, seasonal releases, product-specific branding; all different versions which can be made and cost money or require tremendous amounts of human resources to efficiently and satisfactorily complete. You want a single vector logo on your wordpress blog? Six hundred bucks.