How much does a website cost?

The question of  “how much a website cost?” is one of the most frequently asked questions from prospects.

The competition is often asked very early in the process. That is sometimes difficult: often not enough is known about the necessary parts and finish to be able to answer that question. In general, you can say that the larger the project, the more difficult the competition is.

A determining factor in the cost of a website is the extent to which the service-providing part has weight on the product-related part. In a manner of speaking, we can work on a very extensive website for a month: it takes five minutes to make a copy of that website. The more your website is product-related, the cheaper.

Other determining factors that influence the cost of a website are:

• Purpose : Before putting anything together, it is necessary to determine the purpose of your website. Is the website just an online business card? Do you want to show your portfolio to prospects? Do you want to generate leads through your website? We can help with this through a digital strategy and an analysis of the existing website. It goes without saying that an online business card costs less than a website that has to generate leads.
• Contents : You may have the most beautiful website with the most advanced information architecture. If you don’t have anything to say or offer, then you won’t have any visitors. No time or no desire to write your own lyrics? Feel free to call on our copywriting services. Content marketing is an important tool for the success of web projects today and absolutely necessary to gain a front-row seat to search engines.
• Layout: Which menus do you need? What is where? How are the different parts linked together? This so-called information architecture determines the look and feel of your website. In such cases, we work out wireframes after a thorough analysis and determining the objectives of the website. Here it is true that a website with a complicated structure, links between taxonomies, and several very different type pages will cost more than a website where one page is on its own and where all pages are very similar.
• Design:  If you choose a website based on an existing visual design (theme), the design has already been delivered. But with customization, a visual design must be created. This usually happens in a graphics program after finishing the digital strategy and information architecture. A website based on a purchased theme is in many cases half cheaper than custom work, but custom projects are often more targeted, with better results in the long term.

So, determining the cost of a website is not always easy. And the larger and more special (understand more special as deviating from the standard) the project, the more difficult it to determine the cost price. But as mentioned, we can safely give target prices for projects with a lot of similarities:

How much does a static website cost?

A static website is at the absolute bottom of the market.

A static website is cheaper than a dynamic website (WordPress or Drupal), but you cannot add content yourself with a static website.

The biggest advantages of a static website are:

• the minimal chance of security leaks (after all, there is no database, only files on a server)
• the minimal cost of hosting
• fast loading times

Static websites, however, remain a niche. Examples are law firms, who want a simple website with only address details and a brief description of the activities, without the need for a blog or a web form. Or real estate offices that want to put a specific property in the spotlight by means of an attractive one-pager.

In fact, every business should have at least one such website. You own a domain name and you have control over your contact information (versus the sometimes incorrect information on collection websites).

An example of a static website: https://gohugo.io/

Price: from 1,448 $, annual hosting from 144 $; no maintenance costs, but a tariff for changes.

How much does a website based on a theme cost?

A website based on a theme provides basic online visibility. The main target groups are sole traders or small businesses. With these websites, a professional appearance is especially important. The focus is on appearance and less on strategy. So fairly standardized.

Part of this market is occupied by online site builders such as wix.com and squarespace.com. Be aware that (1) you will have to put in a lot of time yourself and that (2) it is almost impossible to get out of the limitations of these tools.

We mainly fill the brochure website market with WordPress websites based on a theme. WordPress is the perfect tool for smaller websites, with a very user-friendly and intuitive back office. For the themes, we usually consult ThemeForest ( https://themeforest.net ). Striking here is the huge range of themes for WordPress: more than 8000! Compare with Drupal (+/- 500) and Joomla (+/- 900) and you get a picture of the gigantic impact of WordPress on this segment of the market.

By means of the demos, you get an idea in advance of what you can expect from your website.

We make a sub-theme of the base theme so that we can improve it where necessary and allow later changes without any problems. In principle, the website is already ready upon delivery and a customer can subsequently make changes to it via their own login.

Price: from 2897 $, annual maintenance costs from 362 $.

How much does a custom website cost?

Custom-made websites have a completely different approach.

We create tailor-made websites especially for real SMEs with staff and for non-profit organizations that want to interact with their members.

The phases to a neatly finished custom website are as follows:

• Determining strategy: we make a short analysis of the current website (if it exists), we look at how the competition is tackling things and we look ahead: what do we want to achieve and how are we going to achieve it… Deliverable: analysis.
• Define content: we discuss the different types of content and how we will display that content. Deliverable: wireframes.
• Custom visual design: based on the wireframes, we create a custom design, with a visual representation of all typing pages. Deliverable: source documents and PDF documents of the visual design.
• Setting up functionality and converting the visual design to web language: we make the website functional (back-end development and site-building) and translate the graphic design into semantic web language (front-end development).

We usually create custom websites in Drupal. Drupal allows enormous scalability and is (more than WordPress) better equipped for more complex websites.

Custom websites are built with the idea that changes will often be made. You can log in to the back office, easily enter an image, link to other content on your website. In that case, the investment is easily recouped.

Price: from 5795 $. Annual maintenance costs from $ 362.