Web Site Design
By
HORN and WHISTLE
Web site Pricing Information
What will a web site cost me? This is usually one of the very first questions. Although there is no single answer, there are three expenses that are typically associated with a web site. The first one is Domain Name Registration. The domain name is the name of the site. That's the thing that starts out with www. etc. as for instance the domain name of this Web site which is:
www.HornAndWhistle.com
There are
many web domain name registration services. Typically the cost
runs around $10.00 to $20.00 per year. The second cost is Web
Hosting. Your Web site actually resides on a web host computer
which is online 24/7 and is where, when customers type in your domain
name, they are directed so that they see your Web site There are many
hosting plans and companies out there, some are free, and some can cost
several hundred dollars per month. Free hosting will be loaded with advertising
and may support only the most basic web site necessities. When a client
clicks on a site that is hosted free, he will be bombarded by various
advertisements. After all, there is no really free hosting. Somebody has
to pay! Free hosting relies on the advertising to get its money.
At the other end of the scale you can have
very high-end hosting with, to use the old expression, all the bells and
whistles you can possibly think of. Is it necessary? In most cases no.
Unless you are a huge company doing thousands of dollars a day in credit
card sales on-line or running an enormous database like major banks and
mortgage companies or search engines, you won't need that. A typical good
hosting plan that meets the needs of 99% of web site owners should run
about $75.00 to $250.00 per year, the variations depending on what you
specifically need. Of the web sites that I have on the "sites we
have done for others," page, the prices for hosting range from a
low of about $50.00 per year to $250.00.
The third price
is the one-time site design fee which
is what you pay to us or some other web design business. That fee covers
the expense and time of actually creating the Web site, putting it all
together and getting it on the web. It may also cover registration of
the domain and obtaining hosting, both of which are typically done by
the web site designer or webmaster as he or she is usually called. The
price can vary from a few hundred dollars to several thousand and depends
entirely on how many or how few features and pages your site has and how
many hours the web designer has to spend creating the site. Some web sites
can be put together in a few hours, and some require a week or longer
with several designers working in collaboration. A very simple Web site
with perhaps just a company logo and simple text on one or two pages could
be just a few hundred dollars. If on the other hand you have lots of pictures,
sounds, animations, contact forms and credit card handling, expect to
pay $2000.00 or more.
Think of this like the set-up fee that a
newspaper has to charge. The nice thing about this is that it's a one
time fee only. Once the site is done, there is no more site developer
fee. All you need to do is to keep renewing the hosting and the domain
name regis-tration annually and that is it* for expenses regarding your
Web site, and those can cost easily under $125.00 per year at present
rates. Pretty cheap for a multi-page site that can include full color
pictures, sounds, contact forms, and even animated or moving text and
pictures. You can't get animated text or sounds in a newspaper, at least
not with present newspaper technology.
If you ran a full page ad in a large daily newspaper,
you could pay $5000.00 or higher just for that one insertion. If you wanted
to run it next week, guess what? Another five grand. You might be able to
negotiate a better deal if you tell the paper that you're going to have your
ad in every week for a long time, but they'll still get you for a good price.
But for a lot less than that, you can get an
ad on the web, and once you've paid the initial fees, it's there 24/7 as long
as you want. No new big expense next week or next month.
* If your Web site requires frequent updating of information and if you opt to have the web designer make these updates, you will incur an additional fee for the time involved to make these updates. A good example is that of an art dealer, who on a monthly basis changes the pictures of the paintings he has for sale on his Web site. He would be charged a monthly fee by the site developer for preparing the new photos for web deployment and then putting them into the Web site. Such fees however are generally only a very small percentage of the initial site design and development fee.
