What Does a Web Site Cost?

Regardless of size, I find that every business is cost-conscious, and every business can make contributions to their project, whether it be materials, service or insight. 

Because every business is unique, these factors will vary -- and so will the cost. Some of the costs will be incurred from your regular operations, and some will be out of pocket expenses. 

Instead of "estimating" or "bidding" on projects, I ask you to assign a budget, deadline and working arrangement. Then I can determine how to allocate expenses fit your unique situation.

In GENERAL, the costs you will incur for services are based on ...

• Hourly Rate for my service 
• Number of Decision Makers who are on the team 
• Number of Employees who are on the business team
• Number of Contractors who are on the web team
• Materials and Services you will need to buy 
  (e.g. domain name, hosting service, application service, graphics, etc.) 
• Hourly Rate of Any Other Professionals 
  (e.g. attorney, marketer, copywriter, etc.) 
• Number of Changes that occur in the course of the project. 
• Phase of the Project in which each change occurs. 
• Due date of the deliverables 

• Off-hand knowledge you have about your business
• How many people will need to be interviewed to gather the appropriate information
• The availability of team members
• The accessibility of the data and documentation of your business

• Number of people that represent each part of the process
• Availability of these people
• Complexity of the process

Site Evaluation costs depend on:

• What you want evaluated, specifically
• The interactivity level of your site.
• How many pages your site has
• How many functions your application has
• The depth of the report you desire
• If you would like me to create a presentation reflecting my findings
• If you would like me to deliver the presentation of my findings

Search Engine Optimization costs depend on:

• How competitive your industry is online and on ranking with search engines
• How "optimization friendly" your web site is
• How competitive the keywords are that you intend to rank on
• The number of pages we need to create.
• The amount of writing required.
• The number of search engines you want to target.

Web Design costs depend on:

• The size of the site 
• How much time you'll allow me to explore creative solutions 
• How many different look-and-feels you'd like to choose from
• How available appropriate imagery is
• Whether sketches will be apart of our process
• What kinds of changes you want to make
• The number of changes you want to make
• What touch-ups I need to make to photos you provide
• Whether you want to participate during the design phase
• How many audiences you are attempting to serve
• Whether you intend to optimize for search engines as apart of your strategy

Prototyping & Usability Testing costs depend on:

• Number of user screens required to complete the required level of functionality
• How many subjects will be tested
• The number of tasks that will be tested
• Location of the study
• Equipment used in the study
• Duration of the study
• The cost of the thank you gifts or compensation you plan to offer the test subjects

Digital Photography costs depend on:

• The location of the shoot, or how far I have to travel to where the shoot will take place
• The level of risk involved in the shoot (rare)
• The number of shots taken of each subject
• The number of subjects
• The size of the subject matter
• The resolution of the photos

Architecture, Database Design, Development/Programming & QA costs depend on:

• The amount of the data
• The nature of the data
• The relationship between the data
• The current location of the data
• What functionality you want your site to include
• Whether a database is involved
• What programming languages will be used to create your site
• The scalability of the application
• The browser-compatibility of the application

• If we need to create the media from scratch 
• The type of media we're working with.
• If the media needs to be converted from analog to digital
• If the media needs to be converted into different formats
• Quantity of scenes or clips
• Level of interactivity of the media

Education & Training costs depend on:

• How many people will be involved
• How many topics you'd like me to cover
• What materials I will need to provide
• What lesson plans I will need to create
• The location of the training

Site Maintenance & Updating costs depend on:

• Frequency of the changes
• What kind of changes you want to make

Email Marketing costs depend on:

• How many topics you would like to include in your email
• How many email addresses you have on your list
• How many targeted groups your email addresses are organized into
• How many campaigns you conduct per month
• What management tool we use to accomplish your goal
• What metrics you expect to evaluate