The Cost of Hiring Someone to Build a Website

How much does it cost to hire someone or a web design firm to build a website? The answer to how much a website costs to build depends on the method and quality you choose. This is the same as with any services or goods you wish to purchase. Which option you decide on will significantly affect your budget. 

Cost of Building a Website

The price of a website could range anywhere from $6 a month to an initial design cost of over $10,000. This initial design cost does not include digital marketing services, such as the increasingly important search engine optimization-related services, content writing and creation, the programming and coding necessary to transform the work of designers into websites, or website maintenance and editing. 

The quality of any such work can range from automated templating-based websites that produce utilitarian and functional, though generic websites to pieces of something close to pure art by world-renowned web and graphic designing firms. Influential high-end professional web and graphic designers can considerably affect your business’s developing brand image or social media pages, the entire design world, and beyond. The visual language of graphic design, especially concerning the creation of company logos and usage of type, often becomes the defining visual look of an epoch. An entire website can look dated or fresh and vibrant depending on seemingly minor aesthetic choices like which typeface to use. 

Methods of Building a Website

There are three main methods of producing a website currently. 

The first method is using a website builder. A website builder is an online tool or a program that allows you to build and publish a website without knowing any web design or common web programming languages. Website building software and WordPress employ templating systems that do not necessarily require that the website’s designer knows any standard programming code, like HTML or CSS, but will provide an excellent coding infrastructure using tried and true standardized modular programming and UI (user interface) design methods.

The second method is hiring a professional website designer or design firm. Through careful consultation, this company or person will design your website from scratch using the traditional web and graphic design practices. A web designing firm will contract with or have on-staff skilled and experienced web programmers to convert the aesthetic vision of web and graphic designers into functioning and streamlined websites that follow best practices. 

The final method is using WordPress. The result of a website designed and built entirely in WordPress can be pretty impressive and can easily incorporate e-commerce functionality. 

Website Building

In a purely conceptual way, you can construct a website just like a building. In other words, you can start with the foundational framework of structural coding and work outwards to the look and feel of the graphics and UI. However, that’s not what a website builder is. A website builder is an online tool or a program that allows you to develop and publish a website that can include e-commerce functionality without the user knowing any web or graphic design or web programming languages, such as HTML5, CSS, or JavaScript. 

Website builders include some of the largest and most well-known websites out there, including Shopify, GoDaddy, and WordPress. One of the best advantages of using a website builder is the ability to easily make changes and edits. In other words, you can conduct website maintenance yourself and from any internet-accessible location. You can even do this work on a smartphone. Website building applications don’t require the intensive computing power necessary for traditional web and graphic design software, like Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

WordPress

The most popular website builder is WordPress. WordPress-developed websites account for about a third of all websites online today. It is generally considered the best website builder and one of the most accessible and robust content management systems (CMS). And WordPress itself is both open-sourced software and free. WordPress employs a template-based drag and drop approach to web design and development that it originated. Most other website builders adopted this same interface style in web and program-based applications. While at the same time, WordPress offers its users the option to interface directly with the code of their websites. This combination of characteristics and the many other options available to quickly change and edit every aspect of your website via its intuitive and straightforward interface continue to make WordPress the top website builder.

Website Design Cost

Just as with other website design methods, the cost of engaging a digital marketing or web design firm to build your website can vary enormously. The quality and strength of the website’s design are usually the starting point in determining cost based purely on design. Website design cost can vary significantly based on the complexity. The services you choose to include also contribute considerably to website design cost. It’s only logical. The simpler and smaller your website design is, the lower the overall website design cost. The more complex and functional your website is, the higher the overall cost. 

In addition to the quality of the design and the complexity and functionality of your website affecting the overall design cost, there are further considerations when budgeting your website. Digital marketing services like search engine optimization (SEO) tools, strategy, and analytics are vital additional services that may contribute to your overall website design cost. Still, they will pay for themselves with increased organic traffic to your newly designed website, whether for business or personal use sites.

Website Price

There are yet still other factors involved in considering the cost of hiring someone to build a website. Once the website design has been considered, the finished website must have a home. The rest of the internet must be able to find your website. Web hosting and domain registration services contribute to the overall cost of your website design. Web hosting provides the actual physical location of your website, where its files and pages are stored. The security of your website and how much traffic to and from your website are also a part of the web hosting services. Web hosting also is just that: the host for your website. The web hosting server provides a secure and safe environment to introduce your website to the larger world of the internet.

In the same way that web hosting services provide a physical location for the files that make up your website, a domain hosting service provides a map to the location of your website through its translation of your domain name into an IP address that matches up with the physical location of the files that make up your website. The two services, web hosting and domain hosting, are often joined together into a single service. However, this is not necessary. You could always have separate web and domain hosts.

SEO Design Chicago Website Building

So how much does it cost to hire someone or a web design firm to build a website? Website prices can be nearly zero to infinity. It can cost any amount to hire someone or a design firm to build a website. It depends on your intentions and budget, and there are practical concerns. If you’d like to explore your options for website building, reach out to SEO Design Chicago. We can give you pointers as you create your website yourself or do it all for you from beginning to end.

FAQ:

• How much does building a website cost?
• What are the methods of building a website?
• What is the most popular website builder?
• How do website prices vary?
• What is included in website prices?