Often it takes many visits and many hours to nail down what exactly the owner wants. So I have to estimate the time I will spend in traveling to client’s site to discuss the requirements and making notes, auto expenses, phone charges, and what-not. Then there is the question of graphics. To date, I haven’t come across a client who likes the artwork that is presented to him. How many iterations of artwork are reasonable? I have to make an educated guess and attach a dollar amount to it. Of course, I have to take into account the actual effort likely to be spent in HTML coding and programming – something I don’t know at the beginning because I don’t know what the client wants. The next obstacle is content. In my opinion, writing appropriate content for a web site is the most difficult task. Clients invariably tell me not to worry about it because they know their business like the back of their hands. Yet, when the time comes, very few can give me a Word document from which I can cut and paste text on web pages. I get everything from bullet-points to hundred-page anthologies. So I have to estimate the time I am likely to extract this information and reprocess it to make it web friendly. Lastly, I have to account for the dirty little secret in the software industry — no software project can ever be completed before the deadline and within the budget. That means I have to estimate the overrun and quantify it in terms of dollars. Then I can add all these figures and quote a dollar figure like my clients want me to.

As you can see, this procedure of arriving at the estimated price for a web site is about as precise as the procedure for selecting the winning Powerball ticket. Therefore my answer is “Hmmm… let’s see… uh… that depends”.

Now that I have explained why estimating costs creating web sites is difficult, let me get back to how much should you expect to spend on a professionally-built web site. Naturally, we will have to define what a “professionally-built web site” is. In simple terms, it is web site, possibly with a small back-end management interface, or a storefront. It may be built from scratch or may make use of existing platforms such as Yahoo Store. It includes:

* Analysis of your requirements

* A custom designed graphical interface using licensed graphics (as opposed to clip art or stolen images) that you approve of

* Professionally written copy that you approve of

* Coding and programming

* Roughly ten or fifteen static pages

* Bulk uploading of data, if applicable

* Training on using the back-end management interface and maintaining the site

If you are a run-of-the-mill small business, your site should cost you in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars. Your site, however, may need additional work. For example, if you are a real estate agent that sells multimillion dollar houses, your web site will target a different class of visitors than if you were selling, say, printer cartridges. Without a question, you will need a lot of attention to details and plenty of brainstorming, both of which can quickly run up the meter. In such special cases, expect to spend roughly 1% of your annual revenue on your web site.

I didn’t get these figures out of the hat. I have built sites for less and for more. So can you. But I find that in general, sites that cost in the vicinity of my figures make my clients happy, and more importantly, their clients happy.

If you found this information helpful please click the like and +1 button. Thanks for your time and I sincerely hope that you find this information useful. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me, Lonney Smith, at info@littlebigguy.com   .   Remember, that this information refers to Static Web Sites and your small business can achieve the same thing by simply having a blog created for you at far less the cost.