Average Cost Of Website Design For Small Business

Frankly speaking, there is no such a thing as an Average cost of website design for small business, and here’s why you will probably be disappointed for such a direct answer: It’s almost impossible to come across an apple to apple comparison scenario in your quest to find an average cost of website design for small business. The main reason being that the quality of website you get in the end will reflect on the option you pick next

What you should be asking yourself is how should we be setting our goals for the website design project and what we want to get out of it. If you have time on your hand then probably you do not need a web designer but if you are tight on time, then yes you need to splash out the cash. Before everything else, you will need to come up with a budget that is affordable for you and must work inline with features you intend to incorporate into your website design request.

Having done the work for budgeting, it’s time for you to look for a package that resonates with your spending limits as well as project goals. I have seen web design projects that started with a not so perfect solution, yet overtime and effort, the web site got improved inline with customer user experience as well as SEO requirements for the website design structure.

The best way to strike a good balance is to do a proper homework before committing your web design service to an agency.

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The challenge for many small business owners today is matching needs and budget limitations against features a final website design delivers. This is clearly evident in how different 4 proposals from different web design companies would look like. In many cases you will never believe how far wide they range from pricing points.

In case you haven’t noticed, pricing web site design services it’s a lot trickier than you might think, what you might think it’s a bargain might just as well be a headache to your business down the road To avoid falling for an Average cost of website design for small business syndrome, asking yourself how much will a new website cost is really not the way to get to where you want.

Rather ask yourself where to place your expectations for the budget you intend to allocate. What you get for FREE may not equally offer your business features you would get from what you pay for custom website design price list.

Frankly speaking, that average website design for small business can cost anything from FREE to over £100,000 if you ask me. Get it in your head that a good solution for your business needs will not necessarily be dependent on price of a website design package. It will most likely depend on how you align your goals for the website design project and expectation you have to what this website will feature and look like.

Having said that… this article is all about helping you find a good balance, we intend to provoke you so that you can be inspired to think of what to expect from your new budget and what budgeting range will be ideal to achieve that. On the other hand, this article would not be helpful to you if it doesn’t offer you suggested solutions for different scenarios that might play well into your budget.

Remember, anyone can achieve a website design goal for any budget or at no cost at all!

Alignment

To make good on what price for website design best fits your goals, budget and how much you want to get involved, you need to align all that as key influencing factors to your project.

For starters think of how involved in this project do you intend to be? And if you will be somewhat involved, how much are you willing to price that out as a factor? If your choice for website design was to go for no budgeting for your website design project, it means you will essentially become the web designer, developer, project manager, content writer and marketing manager all together.

While this sounds overwhelming and possibly impossible to juggle in between those roles, it is actually what many folks did when they first started their business with myself included. The good news is that you can outsource many of these activities, cut down on the budget and get the best possible price for your website design.

Goals

Secondly, lets look at what sort of a website are you looking at getting in the end? What I mean is that you can have a website that looks pleasing to eye, yet it’s nothing more than just a business card online that does nothing for the business or you can have one that functions and looks good, on top of that, it is a money making machine that gets you business leads, informs or educate your clients on what your business is all about etc.

Is Your Website Better Than Your Competitors? Or Can it stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the industry key players in your area of expertise? You will have to think each of these things as they are all different goals and on different budgets if you intend to espouse them into your website design brief.

Budget

Now that you have all your goals mapped out, expect that you will have to do some adjusting to see how best that fits with your original goals.This is the stage that you will have to decide, how much hands off or involved you intend to be. In other words what I mean to say is that, the higher the quality website with less involvement in how to achieve that, the more it will cost you so the budget will have to take that into consideration. Think of what you expect to just be an Average cost of website design for small business, will become a pay per play gig.

What If It’s An eCommerce- How Much Does An eCommerce Website Cost To Build And Host?

Just like any other website design, there is no one size fits all here! the pros and Cons are pretty much the same. With that said, do not be afraid to get started with what you have, some times the trick is to think of what you want out of your eCommerce either as a short term or long term.

There is a good reason for doing this, If you decide to go for your very own eCommerce website on self hosted platforms like Woo-commerce, Magento or open cart, your average costs will fall within the range of between £600 to a million, depending on the platform itself and what you intend it to feature.

As a business owner, your thinking will probably be like, “let me build my eCommerce website and get that cost out of the way”, well that’s very noble of you unfortunately it doesn’t really work like that in the real world. If you are wondering how much does an eCommerce website cost to build and host and why the costs run up into millions, it’s because eCommerce websites are much like changing seasons.

They need constant maintenance for your business to remain competitive and relevant. To suggest that you will build and let it age it’s not prudent business acumen, in fact waiting for everything to get outdated before you tackle them is not a proactive approach for any brand that intends to remain competitive.

Your eCommerce upkeep on monthly basis will have to be factored into your budget, these will have to be looked at on case by case basis so you can delegate out side your business as you may very likely fall short of expertise to manage certain areas of the eCommerce.

Things like SEO for your eCommerce business, do you intend to outsource or you will hire an in house team of search engine marketing for eCommerce? What I would recommend is to break down what activities you intend to keep in the house while the rest is thrown on into the outsourcing pot. Assuming that your initial budget for you ecommerce was £350K

The table below should help you see what will influence cost to your ecommerce and how to navigate round them.

eCommerce Platforms

There’s a dramatic variation of pricing all emanating from the fact that your chosen form of platform where your eCommerce website will run has different forms of licensing and features too. Some features are industry specific which come with integrated solutions that best suits on ERP systems for that particular industry, all the way down to software as a service solutions that are designed for ease of use for small business owners so they can simply get setup with one simple click of a button.

If it helps , these Saas eCommerce platforms have been broken down for you in a separate helpful guide on how to choose the right one for you and everything you need to get started. Some small business owners have no luxury for budgets, there are Saas solutions best suited for you too.

These platforms offers start from as little as £14.99 to £29.99 per month. Yet more and more business owner who are on the look out for custom eCommerce solutions tend to be those who do not want to be limited in features and are quite happy to spend bit more to acquire customizable solutions like Magento enterprise, which is not designed to be setup by non experienced .

Magento requires expertise to get it all setup for you, this is why is you are wondering How much does an eCommerce website cost to build and host, I will say you will very likely spend somewhere between £5000 to £100,000 if you came across a good digital and web design agency that will set it up for you, train your key staff members and setup your onboarding training for your new staff in the back end of your eCommerce website.

What I love about eCommerce web design from these popular platforms is the plethora of options in themes and templates you can choose from to enhance your website look. These are easily applicable to your site either by a competent website designer or you can equally do it yourself. While many software as a service eCommerce platforms may not set you apart in such a dramatic way,the upside of using them is how quick and easy you can get to market.

The entry budget is significantly low too, expect to spend somewhere between £0 to £230 to purchase an awesome theme, and an additional £1000.00 to £2000.00 to tweak it and make it look nice. These sort of customization are often limited to change of custom logo, and possibly minor layout tweaks.

Once you have a budget, then your possibilities are limitless, just to warn you, requesting a custom designed theme can cost up to tens of thousands, your rule of thumb should be your requirements and customer user experience.

Most eCommerce website owners will only ask for custom programming or functionality if they are looking for a specific module or just to extend the sort of supporting functions available within the legacy design.

Anything is possible with a budget in eCommerce website design. If you are taking up on some of the design work yourself, make sure to check first which extensions you want to include into your eCommerce website design before you venture into spending hours developing custom code.

One thing I have learned over the year is that most extensions have poorly structured code writing, so be prepared to come across such issues. When you buy ready made extensions, it’s best practice to examine the code for any backdoor loopholes as these are common security issues synonymous within our industry.

You probably are tempted to go the custom development route, the only challenge is that outside of known extensions, things can get quite expensive real quick when you decide to develop custom extensions for your business. Hiring a good developer to develop code that is well structured, reliable and secure can be of great advantageous yet expensive too.

They say you pay for what you get which ever way you go, if you choose to go cheap on your eCommerce website design you pay the price with security compromise that ends up threatening your most priced assets in your business when you have been hacked, If you choose to set an acceptable budget for your eCommerce website project, you get peace of mind and guaranteed business safety at the expense of higher website design costs.

These two scenarios are very common in the wake of increased online security threats, as extensions can break during upgrades, if you are too sloppy with your core system design, you will surely pay more money to get your eCommerce back online.

It is always helpful to get the basics right from the beginning than panic when customers are freeing off your website to your nearest competition.

eCommerce Web Hosting

This is possibly the most predictable of all than there are variable. If you choose an eCommerce with a software as a service you will most likely get web hosting included. The only thing I would advise you to look into is whether data storage limits or traffic and bandwidth limits apply and at what cost if you go beyond the limit?

The common trick in Saas based eCommerce platforms is that they start so cheap and end up costing you more money when your needs grow following a successful product launch. Most small businesses start with the Saas eCommerce option which is between £14.99 to £230.99 before outgrowing it into their own self hosted solution.

Hosting your custom eCommerce will probably set you back some where between £299.00 a month for a very good service that include real time 24/7 support. The only downside is that many of these self hosted web hosting providers will not supply you with true PCI or what you know as credit card processing system as a bundle.

From time to time we write helpful guides on eCommerce and everything you need to know about securing your business online, take you time to read these guides so you know which questions to ask your website designer. Many of the most successful and high traffic websites that boosts of rudundancy, speed, on demand scalability and security, are hosted in state of the art dedicated server environment which sometimes cost ranges from £999.99 to £2,000.00 a month.

Cost Of An eCommerce Website

Now you know that there is so much that has unprecedented influence on what you would call the cost of an eCommerce Website development, there can never be a one size fits all, but am confident that you have a picture of what it takes to get a good balance by combining needs, features and expectetions so you can put together a robust budget suited to your needs.