WHAT DOES A WEBSITE COST?

You may be an aspiring freelancer or someone who is starting up a small business and looking to get your website developed. Well, you may be any one of the two. How much would a website cost?

As a freelancer, you may have a question, “How much should you charge to develop a website?” OR
As a Project Owner, you may have a question, “How much will it cost to get a website developed?”
Let’s look at the basic understanding which you should have in order to calculate, the cost. Let us consider the website to be a PRODUCT and understand how any product cost is derived.

Product Cost = Material cost + operational cost other than human efforts + [Human Efforts * cost/hour] + Packaging, logistics, setup cost, etc. …

Website Design and Development Project:

SO now more or less you must now know how a product cost is derived. And adding a percentage of profit margin the selling cost can be obtained also consider any taxes if applicable. Let’s now try to derive how we can understand the cost behind website development. For simplicity let’s define an SOW [Statement Of Work].

• Web page/s [Home, About Us, Content Page-1, Content Page-2, Image gallery, Contact Us]
• Web Form/s
• Image/s
• Logo
• Web Domain Name
• Web Hosting + Email Account/s

The SOW should be quantified in terms of estimated hours spent by the freelancer to complete the project. Then multiply the hours with the hourly rate with the total estimated hours that should be the equilibrium cost plus the profit margin and any taxes if applicable will define the total cost incurred by the customer to get the website developed.

Let me elaborate on some of the above elements of the SOW to understand them better.

Web Domain Name:

New domains or some old domains will sell for millions, but you probably want to buy your own new ones.

Web Hosting + Email Accounts:

This depends on the type of hosting you choose (dedicated or shared). Here one needs to forecast the growth of the website. A cheap hosting plan may be an option w.r.t a limited budget, but if the website is expected to grow in terms of content and user traffic then going for a cheap hosting plan may prove to be a cause of failure in the future.

Note: You can even find some free hosting but they have huge limitations. Additional fees may be required for additions like SSL (Secure Socket Layer certificate) or static IP Address considering web security. But for a simple content website SSL is not mandatory but having an SSL does bring credibility.

Web pages designing:

This includes the visual design, UX design, imagery collection, sitemap and page structure generation.

Web Forms:

Consider you want to collect certain data from the website visitor, for example, you want the visitors to fill in their contact details along with the message and you want this data to be stored in a database then you will need a web form-driven contact page. A quick option will be sending an email from the contact us page to a specified email address, but then that may not be a feasible option in certain cases.

Website Content Creation:

You can compose your website’s content yourself or outsource it. Always remember you get what you pay for with regards to web content creation. Good SEO-rich web content will rank your site high in search engines like google and yahoo. You can also consider graphic editing and creation as part of web content creation services provided by the freelancer.

Project Management Activities:

A task supervisor can help you and your site succeed, and that implies making a line of correspondence between you and the website designer. This cost incorporates starting conferences, telephone calls, and whatever time it takes to acquire the data to get the website going. A freelancer would consider the time spent on requirement gathering and correspondence into the aggregate endeavors spent on the project.

Testing & Training:

Most of the websites these days are built on easy-to-use CMS’, not everyone understands how to operate a CMS-driven website hence training is required. So the time spent in this training is billable.

Other freelancing Services:

Blog writing, post-launch testing, and content maintenance are some more services available along with website development. Social account and page creations are other services provided along with website development and designing services.
So as we see, even in the simplest website development project, there are lots of small to big tasks which are performed. A smaller budget is not a constraint you will still be able to get a website but then the branding, quality, security, and support will be compromised.
In any business first impression is the last impression. If you are still not sure about the cost factors involved in your project you can contact us and Mumbai Freelancer can help you to formulate the cost of your project.