Pricing and Budget Considerations

Two Primary Investments

Businesses should be aware of two primary areas of investment necessary to have an successful website.  The initial investment is for website development and design.  An ongoing budget also needs to be established for website promotion (see Critical Success Factors).  Hosting is also a cost to be considered but is usually only $20 to $40 a month.

Development and Design

The initial investment for a professionally designed website generally runs $2,000 to $4,000.  The average cost for our sites is around $3,000.  We present final budgets in our website proposals that detail out the budget and specify other requirements for the project.

Here are a couple of examples that may help you better understand our development budgets.

A professional, custom designed website-  This type of site includes:

• Response forms
• Content Management System
• Custom interface design
• Code optimized for search engines
• Training for site maintenance
• website strategy development. 

This is our most common type of project and requires a budget of around $3,000.  Removal of the content management system can bring cost down to $2,000.  Please note that we highly recommend including the content management system.

E-commerce site-  This includes:

• setup of online store with shopping cart capabilities
• integration of site with gateway service
• inclusion of store items and information.

Adding e-commerce capabilities to a website requires a budget of around $1,300.  The budget can vary based on the number of items to be included in the store.  We recommend e-commerce development be included with a custom designed interface (see above).

Promotional Budget

It is very important to set a promotional budget for your website.  There are now a variety of good pay-per-click advertising programs that allow you to set your own budget.  Depending on your market and your goals we generally suggest considering a quarterly budget of $500. 

You may also find our online advertising analysis helpful in making sure your advertising budget is as effective as possible.  Our online advertising analysis run around $160/quarter but can vary with the complexity of your promotional campaigns.