One of the questions we receive most often as a web design company is “How much does a website cost?” Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to give a good answer or even a ballpark budget without more details. With little to no information, our answer would be “Anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000″ Since this answer is not helpful at all, this article is going to break down website components into smaller pieces to get a better idea of what goes into designing and implementing a site.

The website itself and questions that influence your web design budget.

Clients sometimes do not differentiate between the website and the services associated with website design: branding, illustration, SEO, social media, etc.  Some components are decided as part of the website design, some of them are optional and are considered additional services.

How many web pages, how much creative web design and what functionality is required?

A good starting point for determining how much your website will cost is the number of pages you want it to have. Here at Matmon, before we start anything we help you fill out a client questionnaire. This questionnaire helps us determine how many pages, calls to actions and functionality your website needs in order to determine how complex each page will be.

Price: The fewer pages you want and less amount of creativity needed the cheaper your project will be. For a 3-5 page website, budget around $1,000-3,000 and sites that require branding will fall between $5,000 – $10,000.

What platform, a WordPress CMS or Simple HTML site?

Do you want to be able to update your website on your own, or do you want a website that will just be an online presence that you will very seldom make changes to? If you’re interested in the former, we advise you to go with a website built on the WordPress platform. The back-end of WordPress is easy to access – you only need a computer, web browser and Internet access. It is simple for clients to make their own updates and be independent with updating their websites.

If you need a small website to serve as a simple online brochure, using a traditional HTML coded site and accessing it via FTP may be the solution for you.

We have more options available but a robust WordPress CMS or a simple HTML site are the most common solutions for Matmon customers.

Budget more for a WordPress site development and ongoing system updates as it usually takes longer to properly customize and support than a traditional site. However, you can do most of your updates on your own with a WordPress site, whereas you will more than likely need our support to update a traditional HTML site.

Which features?

A website can either be plain with pages, pictures, text, maps or videos (these items are considered content rather than features). A feature is something in addition to content, such as a blog, forms, custom web applications, or eCommerce. This also is something that will be covered in our questionnaire, so that you get features that are just right for you and your users.

The more features, the higher the price. It takes a pretty firm grasp of your eCommerce needs to establish a budget.

How customized will you website be?

At Matmon, we don’t do template websites. You can be sure your website will be unique. Some websites require more customization than others. Certain drop-down menus, information that pops up when you pass your mouse on an item, text effects, showing alternate images, etc. Are all features that look effortless but may require extra time and should be planed before your website proposal is signed.

The more customization, the more expensive the site will become. For every price range given, aim for the highest price range if you want your website to do more tricks.

Services external to the website

Search Engine Optimization

Getting your website optimized by search engines happens during and after the website’s development but is not a mandatory component. For this reason, this is considered a service and not part of the website design

It varies according to your site, but count around $500-$1500 for one-time SEO project.

Hosting your site

Where your website will be hosted is important. If you spend a lot of money on a website, you want to make sure it will be up at all times and secure. Matmon hosts its websites in our secure data center facility.

Prices can range drastically for web hosting as well: $25 for a simple HTML site, $75-$250 for most WordPress Sites and $1000 – $2000 monthly for sites that need their own specialized servers

Branding

If you’re a business that is just starting out, we can create logos, business cards, brochures and more. This is not part of the website design process either and should be done before the creative process starts.

Price: depends on what needs to be created.

Measuring your site’s efficiency

Once you have your new website, a good thing to do is to monitor its performance. Matmon can track visits, clicks, who comes to your site, how many times, how long they stay, what keyword(s) they used to search and much more. This is especially important if you are trying to recruit new customers through your website.

Price:  In the $75 range for a monthly report.

How often will you post updates?

Once your website is delivered, you can choose to update and maintain it on your own, or we can do that for you. We offer hourly fees or monthly packages so that you can choose what is best for you. Obviously if Matmon posts your updates, the most often you need your site to be worked on, the more it is going to cost.

Please keep in mind that these numbers are just a range and your site could be below or above these numbers. Additionally, giving an estimate for print media, advertising, social media and other services varies greatly according to the work you want done.

For a complete estimate of your web design project, please complete this survey and one of our representative will contact you with your quote.

Best WordPress Sites being used by Ten Companies

At Matmon, we are big advocates of WordPress Sites. The open-source content management system has made its way from a simple blogging platform to a powerful CMS capable of handling the most unique tasks. Unfortunately, a lot of people can’t get behind its humble beginnings as a blogging tool and don’t see it as a great way to build a website. We have been using WordPress for our clients – and even ourselves – for over a year, (look at our portfolio to see our websites) and they all love it.

Here are a few reasons why we love WordPress:

• It’s user-friendly: there is almost no learning-curve for WordPress, anybody can learn how to use it in less than an hour
• You can easily update your website: WordPress is great for clients that often post new pictures or change content, no knowledge or HTML or CSS.
• It allows for accountability: since all users can have their own login, it is easy to keep track of who makes modifications
• There are plenty of plugins: there are plugins for everything, allowing for great flexibility
• It’s completely customizable: you can create a unique website just like you would with HTML
• It’s free!

To prove that no task is too large for WordPress, here are 10 large companies that chose to use WordPress to power their websites and blogs:

1. Ebay

   
   The online auction giant uses WordPress to power its blog, Ebay Ink. We love the casual look and feel of the site, and its great use of color.

2. CNN

   

   CNN uses WordPress to manage the site for Anderson Cooper’s show: Anderson Cooper 360°. The site is updated several times a day with articles, videos, user polls and Cooper’s Twitter feed. It acts as a behind-the-scene look at the show.

3. Mashable

   

   Mashable is the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology. Mashable has 19 millions page views a day and receives more than 20 millions unique visitors per month, and lets its visitor interact with different social plugins. Users can follow topics, such as Twitter, iPhone, iOS5 or Small Business. Posts are tagged and organized using WordPress’s organic features, and some added plugins.

4. University of Arkansas at Little Rock

   

   The University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s website is dynamic and modern, thanks to WordPress. The entire site uses WordPress, but the best part resides in the homepage. The main picture, posts, events and navigation are all easily managed through the use of different WordPress features. Every department has access to manage their own page, allowing for rapid and convenient updates.

5. TechCrunch

   

   TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. The website receives more than 13 million page views a day.

6. IconDock

   

   IconDeck offers stock icon that designers can quickly buy and download. The site utilizes WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plugin to power the downloading of free icons and ensure the easy purchasing of paid icons. IconDoc’s website is beautiful and sleek, and we love the icon drop zone that allows users to easily drag and drop the icons they want to buy.

7. Spotify

   

   Spotify is an emerging leader of the music streaming industry. Spotify chose WordPress to power their website, which is a showcase of their products and offering. We love how the company showcases Spotify’s features (as seen here) with an easy, flowing navigation.

8. UPS

   

   UPS uses WordPress for the UPS Racing Team website. This site features behind the scenes video, photo galleries, blog posts, twitter updates, games, and promotions for the UPS Racing team and their fans. WordPress allows UPS to integrate social media throughout its content, and the custom administration module allows editors to update promotional content on most pages.

9. Mozilla Labs

   

   Mozilla – the famous company that gives us Firefox – created Mozilla Labs which is a virtual lab where people come together to create, experiment, and play with new Web innovations and technologies. WordPress allows Mozilla Labs to easily display their current projects through simple and intuitive navigation.

10. Dymo

    

    Dymo’s Industrial site is a great showcase of WordPress’s functionalities: it uses location based store finder, custom post types, events, and makes a great use of WordPress’s taxonomy feature. The result is an attractive, professional and usable website.

Here is a great infographic created by InMotion Hosting to understand the difference between Shared Hosting, VPS and Dedicated Servers using an housing analogy. You can also look at our post on website hosting where we talked about these types of hosting, but also Cloud hosting and more.

We recently blogged about secure domains and how to assess whether or not your web project requires one. This article will give you tips on how to choose a marketing agency that will be able to provide you with a business environment that is truly secure. It is really important to evaluate and choose your team wisely; realizing your team could be a liability when the project has already started can be costly and risky.

All web development is not created equally

When choosing the team that will develop your web presence, cost should not be the primary factor. Spending what is necessary at an early stage can help you save in the long run. Likewise, web development and web security should not be an afterthought.

Here are a few things to look for in your web design or marketing vendor:

1. They should be highly experienced at producing quality and secure code. This is a professional’s job and amateurs shouldn’t be trusted with such a crucial part of the project.
2. They should be familiar with the most common exploits – a bug or glitch in your system that hackers use to their advantage to invade your domain – used to gain unauthorized access to your data.
3. They should be familiar with code auditing tools. In the case that the code fails the audit, they should be able to understand why and fix the issue quickly.
4. They should be familiar with passing audits of their hosting infrastructure. For this, your team should have total control over the infrastructure, or at least, a good relationship with the hosting provider.
5. They should be accountable for issues that are raised under future audits. Indeed, new exploits are discovered on a continuing basis and no code is 100% protected. For this reasons, you need a solid ongoing relationship with your vendor. You also need to be sure that if a new exploit is found during a future audit, your vendor will be aware of it and be able to address the issues immediately.

Tips for choosing the right marketing team for your secure web development project

1. Third-party auditor. If you do not have one, hire one; you should not rely solely on your marketing agency for your security audit. The auditor should scan the site as often as possible during the pre-deployment phase.
2. Investigate common exploits and ask your vendor how they plan to defend against them. They should know what SQL Injections are and be familiar with Cross Site Scripting. A good question to ask the team is how they would prevent common exploits from being introduced in your site’s code. If they do not have a well-reasoned answer, we advise you to look elsewhere.
3. The team’s experience. They should have been developing web software for quite a while and be familiar with security audits. If you give your prospective web team an example report from an auditing company, they should understand how to solve the issues raised by the audit and apply it to your business or domain.
4. The hosting environment. If it is not hosted in-house, a good relationship with the hosting provider is essential.  It should preferably be hosted on a machine dedicated to your domain that host no other client and that isn’t being used to develop code. It is also preferable that your team has complete control over the machine and that they personally administer it. Ask where the server environment is located, what operating system is in place and what applications will be running your code. Finally, it is also important to know how often the server is patched, what firewall is in place, and how it’s managed.
5. Ask if the web team is dedicated to your project. According to who you’re dealing with, the web team and marketing vendor can be in the same agency, but it may happen that the web team is outsourced on a project by project basis. This is very common especially if you’re working with a traditional marketing agency. If this is the case, you do not want to wait to find out if they will work well together, it is better to pick teams that have already collaborated on web projects. Keep in mind that advertising agencies outsourcing web development may pose a problem when it comes to accountability. Having a web team that is an employee of the firm makes it easier to build a trusting relationship with the developer, and improves turnaround on addressing issues, especially those that may arise after the site is in production.
6. Direct access to website developers. Developer access is essential to quickly diagnose problems that need immediate attention. Therefore, domain security experts and auditors for your business need to be able to access the developers to discuss the issues that have presented themselves.
7. Talk about the future. It is recommended that you have agreements with your vendor for support after the website is live, and make sure both you and the vendor are comfortable with the ongoing arrangement before work begins.

Website owners often tend to overlook the importance of choosing the right hosting provider.  Your website’s speed depends greatly on where it is hosted, so the two main components that will affect your decision are cost and speed.

You have four main choices when it comes to hosting your website, we will review all of them in details. You can host your site:

• With virtual hosting ( or shared hosting)
• on a Virtual Private Server (VPS)
• on a dedicated server
• in the cloud

The four main choices

Virtual/Shared Hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

Dedicated Server Hosting

Cloud

Your website can also be hosted in the cloud instead of on a server. The cloud means storing your data on the internet rather than on a machine in the back of somebody’s office. By hosting on the cloud, you can use as much or as little resource as you need, the internet is your limit. It also often cheaper than hosting on a server as maintenance cost are shared by a lot more people.

The cloud does have cons, your data can be all over the internet which is not a good idea if you handle secure information. It rarely goes down, but when it does you cannot do anything since it is all hosted online; and vice-versa if you do not have access to internet you cannot use your files.

How do I choose?

Your hosting needs will depend on how much resource you need. If customers interact with your website a lot –  such as if you have an e-commerce store or a login area – you will need more resources and your customers will be more demanding on the speed of your website.

To sum up, for more websites shared hosting is enough. The same websites can pay a little more for the added security that the VPS provides. If your website uses large web apps, then you might have to go for a dedicated server. Once you’ve made up your mind on the size, you can make up your mind on whether you want your site to be hosted on a machine, or in the cloud.

You should be able to ask your website developer for their input, and they should be able to recommend the best options for you site. Here at Matmon, we offer all four of those options in our data center, in the cloud and with third-party providers.

Customers need to know how much their website will cost. Unfortunately no two projects are the same, and assessing how much work is going to be involved for projects in the digital space can be difficult. This is especially true when a ballpark estimate is needed before project details are flushed out.

This article on Folyo’s blog should help you get an idea of how much you can expect to pay for various design services offered by interactive agencies and advertising agencies. The article however only talks about the designing part, creating the layout, and making it user friendly and pretty. These prices do not involve the coding part which is just as important as the design part.

If you are looking for an estimate for your interactive project, take our survey and we will send you a ballpark budget estimate for your interactive project.

We reposted the whole article here, but you can head on to Folyo’s blog to read the article and comments.

“How much does a website cost?” and other pricing questions

via “How much does a website cost?” and other pricing questions | Folyo Blog.

If there’s one thing nobody seems to want to talk about, it’s pricing. Most designers don’t publish their rates, and good luck getting a company to tell you how much they paid for their site.

The results of this situation is that it can be pretty hard to know how much to spent on design. Spend too much, and you’ll be accused of wasting money like those $300,000 logos you read about. Spent too little, and you risk ending up with a crappy “designed by my 14 year old nephew” website.

So I asked 40 of Folyo’s designers to answer a couple questions about their pricing strategies, and I hope the results will help you get a better picture of design prices.

A couple disclaimers

• All prices are for design only, i.e. they don’t include any sort of coding (no HTML, no CSS, no Javascript, no PHP, etc.).
• The sample size was very small (40 designers). Keep this in mind while viewing the results.
• Folyo only selects experienced and skilled designers. So yes, you can probably find cheaper prices elsewhere (but not better designers!).
• Folyo is an international site, and this plays a big role in pricing. A designer in Bangalore will not charge the same as a similarly skilled designer living in San Francisco. That does not mean you should always with the cheaper designer, since other factors (time difference, cultural differences, etc.) will also come into play.

How much do you charge for a logo?

The logo is often a startup’s first contact with a designer. You need something that will look good for next month’s big presentation, and you need it fast. But how much will it cost you?

Although survey results show you can get a logo done for less than $500, I would be careful with such a bargain. A logo will often represent your company for many years to come, and will set the tone for your whole communication.

Plus, despite what many people think, a logo is not the same thing as a brand. Paying a higher price often means that the designer will not only come up with a logo, but think about what it means and how it can be used in different contexts (online, print, video, etc.) and provide different versions (color, black & white, etc.).

So altogether, I would say $1000 is a good starting price point for most logos.

How much do you charge for a homepage?

The homepage (or landing page) is usually the next step. It’s a more time-consuming job, so the prices are starting to creep up. Depending on the complexity, you’ll pay anything from $500 for a simple teaser to $2000 for a full-featured landing page introducing your product (think Basecamp’s homepage).

How much do you charge for a website?

This is the classic question every designer dreads. Asking this is like asking an architect how much a house would cost, or a surgeon how much an operation would cost. It all depends on the specifics, so providing a straight answer isn’t easy.

Still, assuming that a basic site usually has a homepage, a basic content template, and 1 or 2 additional layouts (pricing page, features page, etc.), we can get an idea of the costs involved.

Count at least 30 hours of work. The homepage alone will usually eat up 15 hours (and that’s for fast workers), and each additional layout can take 3-5 hours to design. So a basic site will easily reach into the $3000-$5000 range.

How much do you charge for a mobile app?

A mobile app is usually simpler than a normal site, but simpler does not mean easier. In fact, the simplification process itself can be the hardest part of the project: which feature do you keep, and which one do you cut? And how will you keep the UI clear and uncluttered?

Mobile apps also frequently have higher aesthetic expectations than websites. Although there’s nothing wrong with the default OS controls, it’s now expected that every app will have its own style and every little visual details counts.

These factors mean that even with less pages or less contents, mobile apps are not cheaper to design than websites, and $2000 is probably a good place to start.

How much do you charge for a web app?

Web apps are in a pricing range of their own, with a lot of designers charging $5000 or more. The reason is that there is no such thing as a “small” web app.

For example, the mere fact of supporting user accounts will mean having to design sign up, sign in, and “I forgot my password” screens as well as all the different error states associated with them.

What’s more, unlike a static site, a web app must be constantly evolving and pivoting to meet user’s needs. So requirements are hard to pin down, and designers must often plan for unexpected new features being introduced mid-way.

And lastly, designing a web app requires a very specific profile, a hybrid UX/visual designer who can both make something look good and make it work great.

All of this explains why this is the most expensive category, and why a $10000 design budget for a web-app is nothing out of the ordinary.

These survey results are by no means exhaustive, and keep in mind that every project is different. Still, I hope this article will provide you with some general ballpark figures that will help the next time you have to price a design project.