Cost is an important factor for businesses when deciding to work with a web design company. Determining that cost can seem like magic though sometimes. We’re writing this quick article about how much websites and web design should cost in 2019 to pull back the curtain on what goes into a website bid.
Web Design Hourly Rates
We’re very upfront about our hourly rates here at Ideas and Pixels. We charge $95/hour for all consultations and work projects. We’re upfront about it because we’re actually a bit less costly than a lot of our competitors. We’re in the midwest of the US (Cincinnati), so our prices are most likely deluded lower than that of coastal towns and cities. In Cincinnati, you can expect to pay between $80-150/hour for web design and development work (we’ve seen quite a few competitor proposals to know this). You will find developers charging less, but they’re often green and inexperienced, which can lead to more hours being expended, which can end up costing more.
Web Design Project Cost
Our company tries to be fair when quoting project-based fees, so we quote our projects based on estimated time x hourly rate, then pad our estimate by 10% to account for inevitable changes in scope or delays that might come during the project. Often times web design companies don’t do this though — many of our competitors simply do use a magic formula to price out a project: the size of your business multiplied by as much as they think they can squeeze out of you without being offensive.
To ballpark our costs against standard projects, this usually means that a brochure-like website comes in between $3,500-$5,000. Marketing websites with actual strategy employed, along with various integrations with APIs, CRMs, etc, generally cost between $7,500-$12,000. Large, overly complex websites can vary between $15,000-$35,000. Most websites that clients need fall in the first two ranges though.
Considerations
Websites are your company’s primary marketing tools. There is no other piece of collateral that will get more interaction and eyes than your site. Building a professionally branded, custom website is a tedious process that involves dozens of disciplines, from digital design knowledge, to coding/development fluency, database management skills, server administration and hosting competency, and domain DNS management. A competent developer has put in thousands of hours into learning all of these things. There is a large cost associated with this.
It’s important to remember that while spending thousands of dollars on your website may seem like a lot, often times businesses can easily recoup this cost in mere days or months, depending on the website’s ability to generate leads/sales. Like so many things, in web design, you get what you pay for.
