Website development costs

Website development costs need to consider wisely during planning stage of a site development project. Project will turn into a costlier one if you make a wrong decision during initial stage of the development. In a website development 5 processes followed one another. These are

1. Website infrastructure
2. Design
3. Content
4. Automation tools and plugins
5. Maintenance and updates.

Website development costs is associated with above every 5 steps. Now let’s see how every steps requires separate budget

Website development costs  depends on selecting a website infrastructure:

Website infrastructure is perhaps the most important factor that decides the cost of project budget. Nowadays you have several options at your disposal to build a site. Cost vary from option to option. So, in reality selecting an option will decide your budget cost. A few of these options are:

Build a custom website from scratch: This is the most costly option among others. In this option you will have to hire  professional web developers and designers who will develop your entire website. Designers will make attractive, professional looking design for your site. Then developers will develop custom theme or template. After converting your design to HTML and CSS they will transfer it to custom theme or template to make a fully dynamic, mobile responsive site. They may also purchase paid or premium them and then customize the theme according to site requirements. As you see this option is complex and time consuming. So developers may charge you thousands of dollars that included web hosting cost. This option is for enterprise business owners with custom website requirements. For small business owners with low budget going for this option will be a foolish decision.

Use a content management system: This relatively a cheaper choice. Content management system like WordPress revolutionizes website development process in terms of ease of development and cost. Now anybody with no coding skills can develop a site with WordPress platform. However, if you need a site with your own requirements you still need to hire WordPress web developers to set up and customize your site. If you need a online store to develop for example you will need to use a Woocommerce theme of wordpress and need to customize it what you cannot do it yourself. In this case you may need to spend 500 dollars to 1000 dollars depending on your site requirements. But still budget will be lower than building a site from scratch using a PHP framework like YII,CodeIgniter,Laravel etc.

Use a website builder: You can get your site up & running for as little as $5 per month in this option.

Design:

If you want more traffic to your site and turn them into your paid customers then you need a visually attractive and professional looking design. To get a eye-catching design you need to spend money in the following design related task:

• Logos & graphics: If you don’t have a prior design experience you can get your logo and design as low as $5 dollar from fiverr or upwork.
• Images: You can get free images from sites like Unsplash or Pixabay. Sometimes you may need to edit those free images. But if you really need awesome images than you will need to hire professionals.
• E-mail templates: You need good looking e-mail templates if you want that your  subscribers and customers read your e-mails. If you chose a paid template it will cost you 5 dollars or more. But if you use e-mail marketing platforms like MailChimp & Aweber here you will get of tons of beautifully designed, professional-looking email templates, absolutely free.

Content: In order to spread information about your products, services across the globe you need to populate your site with relevant content. You can do this by publishing two types of content in your site. These are

1. Web content: It consists of all the textual content present on various pages of your website – whether it’s your home page, ‘about us’ page, or product pages. It includes every piece of text on your site – your tagline, sub headings, product features, benefits, FAQs, and more. It involves a fair bit of creative skill to write a persuasive copy. You can hire professional web content writers for doing the content writing job. For 3 or 4 web page content writing your cost could be $250-$300. But before hiring content writers you should check their prior work.
2. Blog content: You can outsource your blog content writing task. But it could be costly. For example $25 per blog post. However, you can get free blog posting too. If you allow guest bloggers to post in your site you will get tons of blog post. Then you can select blog that resonates your business and post it in your site.

Automation tools and plugins: There are many automation tools and plugins are available for effective management and better promotion of your site. Many of them are free. While many plugins are premium. Purchasing paid plugins can increase website development costs. Yoast seo plugin, what many consider number one seo plugin for site promotion, has both free and paid version. Purchasing paid version will cost you $89 per site. However, sometimes you can carry your business with a free version of software. MailChimp is a good example of it. For your marketing promotion MailChimp allow you sending 12,000 emails free per month. If your business does not require sending more than 12,000 emails per month then MailChimp is a perfect selection for your e-mail marketing. In fact website development costs dropped significantly if you can run your site with free version of software.

Maintenance and updates: Once your site is live, you’ll have to periodically run maintenance & upgrades on it. Upgrades can be in the form of new website design, software and security patches update. You will need professional help every time your site’s break. In all of these cases, you have to pay extra money to professionals. If you run a wordpress site for example and if your site breaks down you can hire an expert developer who will fix your site for $80-$100 per hour.