Small sites, big sites, simple sites, complex sites, storefronts, applications, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, etc. You name it, we build it. One question that our prospective clients ask us is: "How much will it cost?" Most people expect to hear a standard and fixed figure or amount. Not a penny more or less. Unfortunately, we can't make such accurate estimates. Our answer usually resembles "That depends on many factors".

How can that be?

We can't do any better. As an analogy, to build a house, one calls a contractor and tells them that they want to build a two thousand square-feet house and then asks for a price. If the contractor wants to remain in business or at all flexible, his answer is likely to be "Well, that depends". Yes, one can quote you a generic figure like three hundred dollars a square-foot, but one can't guarantee it because they don't know yet whether you want quarter-sawn oak flooring or carpet, granite countertops or Formica, generic windows or Anderson, and so on. The details of the building (or the site for that matter) make up the total price of the product (or service). The same is true for design and development of web sites and web applications.

How the big boys do it!

It is easy to quote a price for large, complex sites. The charge would simply be so-many-dollars an hour. Big corporations are used to dealing with contractors who charge on an hourly basis. They usually have in-house technical expertise to decide whether we have the necessary technical expertise and whether our rates are reasonable. They also understand that some amount of time will be spent in requirement gathering and analysis, site design, site development, approvals, meetings, and other administrative tasks. They can determine whether the hours we submit are reasonable for the job.
Quoting prices for small businesses however, requires a different approach altogether. The resources are limited and small businesses do not like to hear hourly rates; they want a specific figure. The problem is that coming up with that figure is not easy since most small-business owners don't even know what exactly they want, although they all have an “idea” about what their site should look and feel like, it is subject to speculation from one person to another within the same organization. It would be similar to asking a contractor for a quote on a "nice" house.

The Assessment and Estimation plan

Often it takes many meetings and many hours to assess what exactly the client wants (or needs for that matter). So we have to estimate the time that will be spent in interacting with the client to assess and discuss the requirements and keeping notes, traveling expenses, phone charges, etc. Then there is the question of graphics. Clients usually do not like the artwork that is presented to them the first time. There are usually many iterations required to arrive at a reasonably and mutually agreeable visual aesthetic that represents a business or a process in order to make an accurate picture and attach a dollar amount to it. Of course, we also have to take into account the actual effort likely to be spent in coding and programming – that cannot be accurately estimated at the beginning since we don't exactly know what the client wants. The it is the question of content. Appropriate content on a web site is the most difficult and at the same time essential task. Clients invariably do not worry about it since they claim they know their business very well. Yet, very few can provide accurate descriptions put in words from which text can be added on to web pages. We get everything from bullet-points to hundred-page business plans that we have to estimate the time we are likely to spend extracting this information and reprocess it to make it fit the look and feel of the web site. We inevitably have to estimate the risks and quantify it in terms of dollars, add all the above mentioned figures and quote a figure the way our clients expect us to.

A Meaningful Estimate

As you can see, this procedure of arriving at the estimated price for a web site is a complex and time consuming affair and one that draws upon years of experience and expertise in the field and demands the most attention as it will make or break the project in the end if it’s not done correctly and reasonably accurately.
Now that you know why estimating costs creating web sites is difficult, let us get to how much should you expect to spend on a professionally-built web site - which is a web site, possibly with a small back-end management interface that may be built from scratch or make use of existing platforms and components. It includes:

1. Analysis of your requirements
2. A custom designed graphical interface using licensed and/or original graphics
3. Professionally written and/or originally written content
4. Structuring and design
5. Coding and programming
6. Many static and/or dynamic pages
7. Exchange of data, if applicable
8. Training on using the management interface and site maintenance