HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO DESIGN A WEBSITE?
As a follow up to our app design cost study, here we’ll break down the web design cost, what builds it, and what are the best practices to optimize the web design price.
Website Design Cost
So your business has grown enough to realize the inevitability of a strong online presence. This means it needs a website.
A significant chunk of your website budget will most likely be eaten by its development that as a non-technical person, you won’t be able to really see. What you will see though is the design galvanized by the front end development and backed up by a strong back end.
Website design is a sensual entity, although not a full-blown art, as good web design follows strict and almost mathematical laws. Grid systems, thoroughly picked fonts, colors, and images make it as technical as anything, while also calling out for the aesthetics. So how much does web design cost in and of itself?
UI Designer Hourly Rate
Let’s start with defining the perfect place to find a web design team. With modern outsourcing strategies and tools for remote cooperation, it becomes more and more common that businesses introduce global development practices. Web design being a subdivision of web development is not a standalone service, but an organic extension of the process with strong emphasis on appeal.
Depending on how much UI/UX web designers make, you can judge about the quality level, delivery, standards, and the level of headache attached.
As a web design agency with 10+ years of experience in different range projects, we know where to aim for the best possible result. You can’t go to high in costs, as there will be no room for other things just as important. You can’t hit the bottom price as well, as you wanna buy nice, not buy twice. So, it’s the middle of the range, where the content provided is of a competitive quality but with reasonable price tags.
What is Web Design Price Composed Of?
Before we go any further, it’s important to understand what exactly you are paying for. Is web design an integral substance, or can you leverage different aspects of it depending on whatever reasons?
Address the following questions:
- Do you need a redesign, version 2.0, or a brand new website?
- Do you need a CMS (content management system)?
- What kind of images do you want: stock, custom, reusable?
- Do you plan on using multimedia?
- Do you imply using eCommerce platforms for your website?
- Do you plan on opening your website’s forums?
These questions will help you figure your way in the web design cost breakdown and help optimize your budget on the assumption of what you need first and foremost.
New Website Design Cost
Redesigning a website is half cheaper than an entirely new design. The basic “from scratch” website design price is going to start from $600 and the redesign cost will be half that, starting from $300.
Pros:
- Freshly new design. A new start is the opportunity to go over your website functionality and have it designed the way you want it.
- Unified information architecture. The scalable structure allows adding content that fits into the general pattern. This possibility has to correspond the modern tendencies and not get dated year into the launch.
Cons:
- Price. The additional cost for new web design is more expensive as it includes all the pages from scratch, entirely new UI kits, wireframes, and graphics.
- Time. Designing something from scratch can be smooth and go faster than redoing anything, however, it usually takes quite some time to design the entire website.
The final new design cost is eventually formed by the complexity of the pages and the amount of content in them. The redesign or semi-new design might save you some initially, but it’s inevitable that you will have to address this later on.
Designing Custom CMS And Blogging
Building a website with blogging capabilities from scratch can assure the unique look and total control over your platform. Consequently, this brings more expenses in time and effort. With website template services, you are getting the complete package with a CMS you can start contributing to right away.
However, there is so much a designer can do with predesigned themes, so the look of your CMS might be dissonant to that of the entire website.
Pros:
- Consistent and in-sync look. Only the blogging space or a CMS designed in the common style of the entire website has that classy, unique, and appealing look and feel to it. As delivery often times is as important as the content itself.
Cons:
- Extravagance. If you are up to a cost-efficient selection of pages to be designed for a minimum viable product, you might consider playing around with blogging themes of template services. The problem is such approach only postpones the necessity of a custom CMS. So as a short-term fix, this might work, but the amount headache makes it not worth the savings.
For a custom CMS or blogging platform design, estimate $500 or half that if you are into using a template.
Custom Images And Graphics
Bad graphics and stock images might be the ultimate off-putting cause for your website. Free graphics are most likely used all over the place and don’t seem to have an expiration date. At the same time, custom photography is way too expensive.
If you are running a business, there is no problem in taking pictures of what you do. That gives you the best representation of your craft and unique imagery as well! Lay down somewhere around $500 to have those images integrated into all the prototypes accordingly. If you are willing to isolate the process and delegate it to the designer, have at least $1000 for a complete third-party custom graphics.
A visual identity budget should also be extended to another $300 to $400 for custom icons, logo design implementations, buttons, and banners.
If you are not willing to concentrate on custom imagery, allow your designer to use licensed images on purchase. It’s important to have the license for the images you purchased. The costs for stock photography subscriptions may vary from $20 to $100 depending on the quality of the content.
Added Multimedia Design
Embedded videos and animations add credibility and attractiveness to any website. Adding a Flash animation, shooting a video, editing, and placing it on your website will cost additional $500 to $700.\
Optional eCommerce Pages Design
If you are running a business not related to selling stuff online, you might feel like eCommerce is not really required on your website A list. You could be missing out big time though. Think of a successful website that becomes a brand. Like any other major brand, you will come up with merchandize or other commodities. This means your website will require an eCommerce engine with multiple services to take care of money handling.
Implementing eCommerce includes shopping carts design, catalogization, and design of payment process screens of various kinds. This raises the price to another $1000 to $5000 or more.
Forum Design
Forums are complicated socializing platforms, specific for theme websites. Forums allow you to consolidate users around the topics specific to your industry. This helps strengthen the community and better know your audience.
Creating a custom forum engine is an unpractical and extravagant idea, taking into account there are multiple SDKs available. Our particular experience in custom designed forums is bound to Discourse. It integrates perfectly into a website design, works perfectly well, is intuitive and easy to use.
Other Costly Features Of Website Functionality
With the amount of website features designed for the MVP, you can run a web application’s core services. However, if you are planning on adding more features to your website and turning it into a robust source of your business services, schedule design of the following features:
- User accounts, membership, authorization: $800.
- User interaction, surveys, polls and comments: $400.
- Newsletter: $500 + monthly fees.
- Analytics, metrics, and reports: $400–$1500
- Social media integration and SEO optimization: up to $5000
Cost-efficient Web Design
An important thing to understand here is web design and development are not built of Lego bricks where you can attach and replace different parts and it all works just fine. A website is an organic entity with a lot of intersecting parts that have to work together for the best result.
This is the reason why delegating parts of work to freelancers, or postponing features and leaving 404s is not the best option. Instead, let the professionals do all the work.
We, at Shakuro, will get you a dedicated team to gradually build your project, adding more complex functionality as we go, while making the best of the available resources and polishing the existing services.
