When you are building your website using WordPress, there are a lot of basics to remember that can make building your website a lot smoother. In this series, I’m going to run through some of the ABCs of your website using WordPress.
Budgeting Your Website
One question that a lot of potential new clients ask me is, “How much does a “typical” website cost?”. My answer is always the same:
“It depends”
There’s No Such Thing as a “Typical” Website
For one thing, there really isn’t such thing as a “typical website”. How much your website will cost depends on a number of factors, like what the purpose of your website will be, what kind of audience you’ll be building the website for, how many gadgets and gizmos your website will need, how big or how small your website will be. And since the answers for these questions are different for every website, it’s hard to pin down a “typical” cost for a website.
What Factors into the Cost of a Website?
The lack of a standard price for a website doesn’t mean that you can’t figure out what your website might cost based on your own needs. In fact, before you even start building a website, you should sit down and start building a budget for your website based on your needs. Here are a couple of factors that you need to consider when it comes to pricing out your website:
- Who’s going to build it?- This is probably one of the biggest factors that you need to look at when you are figuring out your website budget. Right now if you want to get a website online, there are three ways you can go about it.
- Build it yourself (either from scratch or using website building software like WordPress)
- Build it yourself a DIY web building service
- Hire someone else to build your website
Each method has it’s own sets of pros and cons. Building the website yourself is probably one of the least expensive ways to go about it, especially if you use software like WordPress to build your website. But it can also cost you in terms of time and will require some type of learning curve. Using a DIY service will cost some money, but is probably cheaper than say, hiring a web designer to do it and can be easier than building it yourself in many cases. But what you gain in cost and ease of use is often freedom and flexibility. Hiring a web designer is typically the most expensive option on the list, but what you lose in money you often gain back in time and efficiency, plus you’ll often get a much more professional-looking website in the end.
- Who’s going to maintain it?- Building the website is only the beginning. Don’t forget that you need to update and maintain your website once it’s built. And this is a long term, reoccurring task, so that fact also needs to be taken into account as well. The same options that you had for building your website is also true for maintaining it. You can:
- Maintain it yourself
- Use a DIY service that takes care of some of the maintenance tasks
- Hire someone else to maintain your website
Again, the least expensive option is to maintain your own website while the most expensive option is to hire someone else to maintain it for you. Using a DIY service usually falls somewhere in between as far as costs.
- How complex is it going to be?- The size of your website will greatly affect the initial and the ongoing cost of building and maintaining your website. Generally, the bigger your website is and the more whiz bangs it has (like ecommerce, custom programming, fancy design, etc) the more your website is going to cost to build and maintain, while simpler with a few pages and a blog tends to cost less.
- How much can you spend?- This is of course going to be the deciding factor when it comes to how much your website is going to cost. You may want to have a state of the art website with all kinds of nifty features, but if you don’t have the budget for it, it’s going to seriously affect your other decisions, like how the website will get built and how complex it’s going to be. Now this doesn’t mean that you’re going to automatically spend every last dime you have to build your website, but the amount of money you have available to spend can help guide you into a realistic price for your own website based on your means.
What’s Your “Magic” Number?
So now that you have some cost factors in mind, now it’s time to translate that into hard numbers by looking at the typical things you’ll need to set up, run, and promote your website:
- Domain name(s)- Typically cost between $9 to $40 per year, per name
- Website Hosting- Typically costs between $10 to $100 per month
- Email list management- Typically costs between $5 to $100 per month depending on list size
- Ecommerce
- Shopping cart- can be a per transaction cost or monthly cost. Average monthly cost between $10 to $100
- Merchant account- can be a per transaction cost or monthly cost based on use. To get this number you’ll need to estimate your monthly sales you’ll be expecting
- Gateway service- Typically cost between $20 to $90 per month
- Web Design/Web Development fees- Typically costs between $25 to $100 per hour
- Additional software (such as website building software, WordPress plugins and themes, stock photography, etc)
- Marketing (advertising, business cards, direct mail, etc)
So now that you have a list of things that you will most likely need for your website, it’s time to do some research, look at what you need for your website and plug in some numbers.
One of the tools that I have available for my students to help them with this process is the Website Planning List. This downloadable planning guide can help you plan everything about your website from, design, website structure, to marketing and has a handy budgeting worksheet. If you’re planning on building your own website, you can download a copy of the planning guide here . It will come in handy no matter how you’re planning to build your website.
