Website Design Costs

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Custom website design and associated costs

The first question on any potential customer's mind is how much will a typical website cost. Not trying to dodge the question (see below for our sample costs) , websites can cost as little as $3.95 a month up to thousands of dollars depending on your needs as well as your industry.

Cheap Alternatives for Starting Out
For example, if you are just starting out and / or on a tight budget (<$1000) you might want to take advantage of many of the "canned" packages and services available through companies like Intuit. There are also many market specific services that offer canned sites for many industries like real estate, private practice, photography, etc. What you get in these packages is an almost instant web presence at low rates with common robust features that can serve your needs until such time you need to scale beyond what they offer. What you won't get is personalized assistance. The point: It is not a bad starting place but you have to work within their design and feature function offerings. You may even get the benefit of search engine placement on some services. If they meet 80% of your needs, it is worth a close look when budgets are tight. Some quick build services are offered by:

  • wix.com
  • www.godaddy.com
  • Or simply search on industry specific key phrases like "real estate websites" and find any number of vendors offering turnkey solutions for a monthly fee.

Forgotten Marketing Costs
Fivebase is often contacted by smaller businesses looking for retail or wholesale ecommerce sites. What they don't realize is that the real cost (time or money) of their new online venture will be marketing and search engine marketing. As an example, Fivebase was contacted by a company looking to sell Ink Jet cartridges online. The site design costs would have been minimal. They could have even of used one of the vendors mentioned above since the requirements were not very unique. That said, process a Google search on Ink Jet replacement cartridges and see how many sites it turns up.

Depending on the site and market, search engine marketing or SEO can cost time, money or both. If your website plan has not factored in SEO then now is a good time to think about how you plan on marketing the site. Overall, it is not out of the question to achieve higher rankings or drive traffic on a limited budget but you do need to analyze your competition and recognize that it takes work and time. The good news is that this is a DIY activity if you are ready for the challenge. If you are in a local or niche industry, the news is even better since simple engine and site map submissions typically generate favorable placement and are part of our base design package.

Our Sample Costs
We are providing these a la carte costs for budget purposes only:

  • Templates / Look and Feel and Designs - up to $800 dollars
  • Site HTML / CSS coding - $70 per hour
  • Database Design / Dynamic Web Pages / Ecommerce- $100 per hour
  • Integration / JSON / XML / SOAP Design - $125 to $150 per hour.
  • Shared Hosting (Managed by Fivebase) - $20 per month (you can elect to use your own hosting plan without our oversight - we have seen hosting as low as $.99 per month - buyer beware).
  • Managed Dedicated Hosting - $300 per month (only recommended to certain customers with higher level needs)
  • SSL Certificates - $150 per year per certificate.

With the above numbers in mind, a custom designed small business site can take 40 hours to complete including SEO. This would bring the site's cost to an estimated $2500 dollars with flexible terms (e.g., low monthly fee as opposed to a lump sum).

So why choose Fivebase?
As mentioned above, there are a lot of affordable turnkey alternatives for you to consider in getting your site and dream online. As a result, there may be instances when Fivebase is not the best choice for your current needs. However, you should consider Fivebase and contact us when you:

  • Are looking for a custom design or functional solution crafted to your specifications
  • Want personalized consultation and outstanding support.
  • Have needs that scale beyond your current solution.

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