It’s not particularly surprising that the first question someone usually has in regard to getting a website is “How much does it cost?“. This is a perfectly logical question.

The problem is it is the same as asking a questions like, How much does it cost to build a house? How much does it cost to transport goods? How much will it cost to go on holiday? These too are perfectly logical questions that need answers. But the questions lack the required information to give an accurate price.

You can immediately throw figures out there, Oh a website is about $500, a house costs about $80,000 to build, transport is free and a nice holiday is around $1,000. There are answers, and they are 100% true, in some cases.

But do you want the house that costs $80,000 to build? does it have enough rooms? Are the floors made of the material you want? Is there a garage? Are there cupboards in the rooms? Does that include the land? You see how the a simple question starts to unravel.

So talking about websites, how much does it cost?

To design a website you need time and skill. Now the better I get at designing websites, the faster I can produce them, the less I get paid. So if I spend 10 years designing websites, and get it down to 4 hours to produce a good website, I will earn less than someone who has just started and it takes them a week to produce a sub-standard site. Makes sense right?

So what website designers do to try and deal with this straightforward “How much does it cost” question, is create packages, a simple site $100, slightly more complicated $200, even more complicated $300. The more complicated the more time, the more time, the higher the charge. But this does not address the fact that the more skilled you are the quicker you can work.

The problem with this pricing method is that if I quote you $100 for a simple website, I have to allocate that to time. I charge $25 per hour for design work. So at $100 for a simple website you are paying me for 4 hours of my time. I can only allocate 4 hours to the job before I am starting to lose money on the job. Then the question becomes, how much am I willing to lose on this job.

So you can take a package, like the $100 one because it is the cheapest, but then you are getting 4 hours worth of time. I am not going to be focusing only on getting you the best website for your business, but also on making sure it doesn’t take more than 4 hours to complete. The 4 hours you get from me will get you more than 4 hours you would get from someone who has just started in webdesign, which results in a better website, but not necessarily the best website for your business.

What tends to happen is a business goes for one of the cheapest quotes, their website takes forever to be designed and once they have it, it is not what they want, lacks functionality, and does not add value to their business. They either just keep the rubbish site, or they rather soon pay someone else to redesign it for them.

If you want a website, a website that is designed for your business, with the features and functionality that will best work for your specific business, don’t buy a package. Talk to the design company about your requirements, get them to put together a custom quote for you based on what you think you need, they may also be able to contribute ideas as it is their profession to create websites and they know what is possible.

And finally, be willing to pay for what you want. You want a website that is going to generate you thousands of dollars, month after month, very low recurring hosting fees and you want to spend how much on it? $100?

Where in the world can you spend $100 and get thousands and thousands of dollars back every month?

Everyone wants to pay $500 for their dream home, but would a $500 home be a dream home?