How Much Does a New Professional Website Cost?

(Hint: Take a Deep breath … It’s More Than You Think)

20 Must Know Website Cost Variables for Professional Services Firms

Suppose you’ve reached the point where your website doesn’t work to get you traffic or leads, or it’s older than dirt, showing content that you last touched in 2008. Let’s say that you’ve made a tentative decision to develop a new site, and of course, one of the first questions you’ll ask is “how much does it cost”?

For those of us who have gone to Professional Consulting School, we’ve been trained to tell give you this answer: “IT DEPENDS”. That’s the same answer that most of you give when you’re your client or prospect asks about the fee for a compliance or business advisory or planning service,  because, well, it just depends upon a huge number of variables.

So, I’m not going to give you an answer, but I do want to try to give you some insights about what goes into website design or website re-engineering and how your choices affect the ultimate cost. I’ll even give you a link to a few calculators that you can play with to see how your choices impact the bottom line fee for website development.

Determination of website costs start with two basic questions – one strategic, the other tactical. The strategic question is: do you want an on-line brochure or a business portal? (HINT: If you want to see ROI from your website, think portal). Tactically, the key question is how much of the site’s development and content are you willing to outsource versus doing it in-house?

If you are looking for website effectiveness – here defined as more traffic, and more ROI in terms of converting site visitors to leads - there’s a simple linear equation to consider: spend less, get less. Its converse is equally as true: spend more, get more.

Here are 20 elements and their respective scales to give you a basic understanding of what it takes – and how much it costs – to develop a web site:

Back to our main question: how much does it cost? Back to our initial guidance: it depends.

However, if you want to get a very general estimate, here are a couple of website design calculators you can try.

http://www.designquote.net/html/dq_estimate_wizard.cfm

http://www.webpagefx.com/How-much-should-web-site-cost.html

If you are thinking about doing a website re-design or engineering, please give us a call or contact us. We’ll not only discuss costs, we’ll discuss what’s necessary for you to make an investment in your website to get more ROI and more leads