What does a website cost?

That depends.  It’s a bit like ask­ing “How long is a piece of string?”.  As lit­tle as $500, or as much as $2,000,000+!  For most small to medium busi­nesses it’s prob­a­bly in the sev­eral thou­sand dol­lar range, and the cost will depend on a num­ber of factors:

1. The type of site func­tion­al­ity required — from a sim­ple sta­tic site (ie one that is like an online brochure for your busi­ness), to online stores, auc­tion facil­i­ties, bank­ing and other more com­plex, high secu­rity sites.  The more inter­ac­tive fea­tures the site has, the more it will cost.
2. The unique­ness of the site design-wise.  Like buy­ing a kit home ver­sus archi­tect designed.
3. The expected traf­fic and data stor­age capac­ity of the site.  Very heavy traf­fic and high data loads need big­ger, more pow­er­ful servers, and more of them.
4. Uptime and reli­a­bil­ity — if your site needs to be avail­able 24×7×365, you’ll have to pay for that level of reli­a­bil­ity, or accept the occa­sional outage.
5. Main­te­nance and sup­port — if you know how to main­tain, update, backup and man­age your site your­self, you won’t have to pay some­one else to do it (this is impor­tant — a site that’s not main­tained and up to date is use­less, and sup­port costs can be high).  You’ll also save on host­ing fees if you’re pre­pared to go with a bud­get, do it your­self host.

It pays to do your home­work when look­ing at build­ing a web­site.  You’ll need to con­sider what you want the site to do for your busi­ness.  There’s no point hav­ing one if you don’t know why you need it — most of the time a web­site won’t make any dif­fer­ence if it’s not care­fully designed for a spe­cific pur­pose.  For exam­ple, you shouldn’t be sold on a flashy design that’s just a glo­ri­fied colour brochure, if what you really need is a dis­cus­sion forum that cre­ates an eas­ily acces­si­ble com­mu­nity and knowl­edge base for your cus­tomers — and in turn gives you a ready pool of repeat busi­ness through tar­geted mar­ket­ing campaigns.

If you do need a really slick online pres­ence, with up to the minute visual design, make sure you con­sider how it fits your brand.  Online, print and other media should all present a uni­fied image of your busi­ness.  Be pre­pared to pay more up front for great design, as well as higher main­te­nance costs if you need a designer or devel­oper every time you want to make a change.

When you’re going for vol­ume and you’re expect­ing to have a very heav­ily traf­ficked site, or you’re pro­vid­ing big down­loads for cus­tomers, your site will need a much beefier back-end.  This will cost extra in terms of host­ing, and you’ll need to speak to your host­ing com­pany to let them know what you need.  Many bud­get hosts use vir­tual host­ing (shared servers) that can han­dle only a lim­ited amount of traffic.

Reli­a­bil­ity is a sim­i­lar issue — if your cus­tomers need guar­an­teed access around the clock, you’ll have to pay a web host for fail-over servers, mon­i­tor­ing, redun­dant stor­age, off site back ups and dis­as­ter recov­ery.  This can get expen­sive if you have strin­gent require­ments, but even many bud­get hosts can pro­vide uptime in the 95%+ range these days.

Main­te­nance and sup­port is the thing that catches most busi­nesses out, whether they’re large or small.  It’s the one thing that you can get away with­out con­sid­er­ing up front, but can come back to bite you the hard­est later.  You want to add a new prod­uct to your site, and dis­cover that a whole new page needs to be cre­ated, but because the site was cus­tom built, some­one has to man­u­ally write the code, and they charge out at $100 an hour.  An increas­ingly pop­u­lar option is to use a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem so that you can update site con­tent your­self.  What­ever road you choose, make sure you ask your web­site provider about main­te­nance and sup­port before you have the site built!

A good provider will give you advice and sup­port through­out the site’s life­cy­cle — from devel­op­ing the con­cept of the site, care­fully matched to your busi­ness needs, through to appro­pri­ate tech­nolo­gies, visual design, mar­ket­ing and site func­tion­al­ity, and the ongo­ing main­te­nance and sup­port for the life of the site.

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• 10 Hot Tips for Mak­ing Money Online
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• The secret to a suc­cess­ful web business