|
You want to know how much a website costs, and we as web designers want to tell you. Before we can estimate costs for you, we need to know about what problems you are trying to solve. Until we have that information, asking how much websites cost is like asking how much a car costs. The range is so wide that the answer isn't helpful; we need to know whether you are looking for a minivan or a sports car, a standard model with a basic selection of colors and features, or a unique custom job.
What we can do, before hearing more about your plans and goals, is to give you some ideas about what factors will make the project more or less expensive.
Design and Content
Sticking to a traditional layout and design not only saves you money, but it produces a website that is both visitor-friendly and search engine-friendly, and is less expensive to maintain and enhance over the coming years. Custom designs can pack a punch, but can cost more up front as well as later on down the road.
The use pre-fab templates will save you money on graphics design fees. However, altering the template's layout too much will increase development costs and ongoing maintenance, and may interfere with the "friendliness" factor for both visitors and search engines. If you use your own designer, be sure they have plenty of website design experience and know how to create attractive web sites that are also visitor- and search engine-friendly. Designing for the web and designing for print are two completely different specialties - I can't say that enough!.
Use of royalty-free photos and graphics from a subscription service or from your supplier's print material or CD-ROMs cuts down on the cost of custom photography. Some clients take photos themselves and enhance them with their own photo editing software, while others pass the photos along to a graphics artist for final prep for the web. If you opt to do-it-yourself, you'll need skill, special software, and time. For many, it is actually less expensive having professionals do the photo editing for you.
If you require custom photography, artwork, audio recordings, or videography it's best to contract that out yourself, and request web-ready formats for use on your website. Most web designers will be able to work with your production technicians to incorporate the artwork into your website at very little extra expense. Good examples of effective and informative videos for the web are copies of a commercial or a DVD specially made for your audience's needs.
On the other hand, purely decorative animations, usually Flash animations, to enliven your web pages will add to the cost of your website. Well done animations can engage and impress the visitor while other animations can turn the send the visitor away.
A website is nothing without words. Literally. Without them search engines can't find your website and therefore, neither can visitors. Whether you're comfortable writing your own copy or not, the text you provide for your website should be edited for correctness and clarity, and optimized for search engines. Unless you already have web-proven copy, you'll need to invest in professional copywriting. This is not an area where you might want to shave off a few dollars.
In the next installments I'll speak about the costs associated with programming your website as well as hosting, technical support and marketing costs.
Mark Beck is Vice President and Partner of The Boulevard Group, a full service internet services company specializing in web design, web development and internet marketing. The Boulevard Group serves a broad customer base and provides services that include dynamic content management systems, database-driven ecommerce catalogs and shopping carts, and traditional brochure-style web sites. Mark formerly provided content to the Duct Tape Marketing blog where he covered topics relating to web design and internet marketing. He may be contacted at Mark@theblvdgroup.com or by calling 908-876-3707.
If you found this article interesting, you may want to read How Much A Web Site Cost Part II
|
