Every organization needs a website. A website confirms that your business is legitimate, and allows you to explain who you are and why people should deal with you.

If you are creating a website for the first time, then the hard part is
determining what type of site you want, and reconciling the cost with the benefit of having the site.

If you’ve had a site before, then you have likely a clear understanding about what you want, and what you need.

Let’s tackle some myths:

1. The majority of the cost of a website is NOT based on the content management system (i.e,. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any of the thousands of CMS’s in the market). The cost to license plugins and components will be a small portion of the overall cost.

2. The cost of a website and the amount of work that you can put into it and inversely proportional. In other words, the cost will be reduced if you are willing to put substantial work into it. The more than you can do, then less it will cost. Your efforts can help with developing content and regularly working with the developers to check for bugs.

As a client, most of the work is developing content. In 95% of our projects, delays in project delivery are when the client is tasked to write content and they are not ready on time.

As the owner of the vision, when you allow yourself the time to explain a solid vision of what you want and put your time and energy into it, then your website will be much more affordable.

If you do not have a solid vision of what you want and/or cannot give the time to development content, then you need to hire that talent and the cost will increase.

Simple vs. Complex websites

The first question you need to decide on is what you want your website to do.

For most site, the first goal is to promote you or your business. With few exceptions, all websites should explain who you are or your business is. Let’s consider that ground zero, and work upwards from there.

More complexity can be added based on:

  1. If you wish to sell products or services. The costs can be roughly broken into creating the product catalog with shopping cart, and the integration to the payment processing platform.
  2. If you want to provide an online calendar to allow users to change their schedules.
  3. You want to automate in-house business processes, such as customer support requests, processing warranties or similar products, accessing information from internal systems.

With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, implementing smart chatbots or OpBots on your website allows the best of the integration to your business information as a much less expensive option to the past expensive custom integration.

If you are interested in figuring out a cost for your website (or application), take a look at our quoting application on our website.