# How much money does it take to get a website done?



## HIJ.Clothing (Jul 16, 2010)

Hey guys I was just curious to about how much it costs to get a website done. Im starting a clothing line and I have a guy who can charge me about 150 for a simple website with links to all my social networking sites and my web store. He is also saying he can charge under 500 for a website with 
-Some good attention to design and branding 
- blog you can edit
-nicely done static (non dynamic meaning if u want to change them you just call me ) pages
-And a basic webstore that works but isn't like urbanoutfitters.com detail and individual look.

What do you guys think? I think those prices are pretty good but I dont know much about website making the guy is an amateur with experience by the way.


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## smclean06 (Jul 7, 2010)

$100-500 is CHEAP. I wouldn't trust anyone offering those prices at all. 

Unless you've seen his work (and have proof it really is his work) I wouldn't bother. Not something you want done cheaply.

However, if you have the $100 to "waste" that's not a huge investment, so if the website is a mess you won't have spent much. Whatever you do, GET A CONTRACT!!! When you say it's "if u want to change them you just call me" find out how much he's planning on charging you per change. A professional will include a content management system (CMS) which allows you to change all content on your own. He may have such low prices because he's basically trapping you into his services and having to pay him every time you want any little thing changed...


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## jpat (Feb 12, 2008)

HIJ.Clothing said:


> Hey guys I was just curious to about how much it costs to get a website done. Im starting a clothing line and I have a guy who can charge me about 150 for a simple website with links to all my social networking sites and my web store. He is also saying he can charge under 500 for a website with
> -Some good attention to design and branding
> - blog you can edit
> -nicely done static (non dynamic meaning if u want to change them you just call me ) pages
> ...


$500 with a webstore is very cheap. Look at his work. Verify that he actually did that site and ask for references. If his work is good, and he is willing to put it in writing then go for it.


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## selanac (Jan 8, 2007)

If you don't have a website and need to get one up that's fine. I charge $250 for a basic site, and $499 for unlimited space (within reason of course). 

If you're a screen printer, or a t-shirt designer, offer him a trade. You make a screen print his t-shirts for a free website. 

You can build your business one step at a time, or all at once. If you have the time to take, wait til you have enough to make it right, or if you don't get one started now, and change it to the way you want later.

Just so you know, I don't need t-shirts. Designs maybe. If you're having a money issue, stop eating out for a month and you'll probably have enough for the $150 site. 

Everytime I buy something with that anology, I keep going out to lunch, lol.


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## HIJ.Clothing (Jul 16, 2010)

Thank you everyone for the advice!!


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## mads (Jul 31, 2010)

For $500, expect the design to be mediocre at best. Really good web designers would charge you around $2000 for an ecommerce site with about/contact pages. You could also be lucky and know someone talented, who hasn't discovered what he's worth yet.


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## OriginalShortees (Jul 27, 2010)

Usually you get what you pay for. In this case I agree with everyone who says be careful. You are not talking about a web page to show off pictures of your puppies to friends. You need one that will integrate well with your shopping cart solution which in turns need to work with your shipping and accounting solution. Many people start with the plug and play options that some of the big web companies offer and while I can not comment on how well they work, many people seem to use them. If you are going to expect to have any level of success you may want to plan for it. Don't spend 10K on a site but do expect to spend $1500-2500 on something good from a strong developer. Pay special attention to your shopping cart choice and its integration.


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## LODclothing (Aug 5, 2010)

Great info. Any specific recommendations for designers/companies?


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## playera (Aug 13, 2010)

For starting up I wouldn't spend $1000's building a website. Even $500 sounds a lot for start up unless you got tons of cash and a solid business plan. What if your business flops? Your stuck with an investment you didn't see a return from. You should be good with a hostgator account, wordpress, wordpress theme, wordpress e-commerce plugin all under $100 bucks. I can show you my site I just made a couple days ago using the same stuff well I'm still kinda working on it and I'm a noob at web design and it actually looks legit for a first timer that used to host at bigcartel and my site actually looks better than bigcartel theme and more functionality. PM me if you want to check it out.


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## DavidRobison (Dec 30, 2009)

Its not how much it cost, its not how much time it takes, its about wether someone can find the website.

Before you pay anyone to make you a website ask them to tell you the name and subject of a website the've created. Then go to google, Yahoo and Alta vista and search for the site. If these engines don't find the site your web designer is not a good one, period. I've seen some AWESOME looking web sites out there but most were by accidental discoveries. If you sell t-shirts and you expect to sell them on the web then people HAVE to be able to find you. A lot of people now know the basics of making a good looking web site, but few of them can get it properly listed and the amount of time its up on the web only matters if your getting visitors to go there. Without search optimization your wasting your money. Take a look at my site, then do a web search for me. Mine comes up in the top 10% of every relevant search. Having a web site, even an awesome looking one without the proper search word backup is like a rainbow in the dark.

Thats what you should consider most when deciding to do a web site. Trust me I have 6 or 7 web sites and none had optimization and its the only one people find me by. Put your money into someone who can deliver that as well as the bling.


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## mugmate (Aug 11, 2010)

Hi, you could always bulid it yourself try www.1&1.com an eshop is about £30 a month.
Robert.


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## vadan (Mar 9, 2010)

To be entirely honest e-commerce sites have a split market. He low end no frills can be done for $500-1000, mid range with a half decent cms and probably template design $1000-4000, a fully custom site will easily be $4k+ anything up to $20k. It all depends on ur market, competition and the company brand u want to create.

Ppl often forget the importance and effect of a well made site. SEO, management, reports, data processing, site structure, code structure... All these things play a huge part on what search engines see. U wont get this with a basic site, especially using "off the shelf" setup.

A site is ur equivalent of a shop. U wudnt buy a shop and kit it out cheap wud u? Same principal applies.


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## vadan (Mar 9, 2010)

Forgot to add!

Find a good dev team with a designer, not 1 guy who does it all, bad choice. Tell him ur plan. Get a simple foundation up with expansion possibility. Put ur plan on paper so they can confirm it can be done.

From experience I highly recommend Magento. An incredible platform.


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## cryptkeeper (Apr 26, 2010)

I do not touch sites under 1200CDN. 95% of my ecommerce sites start in the 3k range.


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## LODclothing (Aug 5, 2010)

So, let's say the budget was 3k+, can someone recommend a good design firm with solid SEO Skills???


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

LODclothing said:


> So, let's say the budget was 3k+, can someone recommend a good design firm with solid SEO Skills???


You need to start a new thread in the Referrals and Recommendations area to get a referral for someone offering that service.


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## mrhotdice (Sep 23, 2010)

I don't care if they charge 100 or 10,000 dollars. You ask 2 question. Have you ever done a chothing e-commerce before and can you give me a few examples of your work that are up and running on the net. Don't just ask for eamples because a lot of these guys will work for days to make a nice example and then what you get is crap. After you get the examples, call the company and asked how good a job and easy the web designer was to work with on the site. Just


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## smclean06 (Jul 7, 2010)

DavidRobison said:


> Its not how much it cost, its not how much time it takes, its about wether someone can find the website.
> 
> Before you pay anyone to make you a website ask them to tell you the name and subject of a website the've created. Then go to google, Yahoo and Alta vista and search for the site. If these engines don't find the site your web designer is not a good one, period. I've seen some AWESOME looking web sites out there but most were by accidental discoveries. If you sell t-shirts and you expect to sell them on the web then people HAVE to be able to find you. A lot of people now know the basics of making a good looking web site, but few of them can get it properly listed and the amount of time its up on the web only matters if your getting visitors to go there. Without search optimization your wasting your money. Take a look at my site, then do a web search for me. Mine comes up in the top 10% of every relevant search. Having a web site, even an awesome looking one without the proper search word backup is like a rainbow in the dark.
> 
> Thats what you should consider most when deciding to do a web site. Trust me I have 6 or 7 web sites and none had optimization and its the only one people find me by. Put your money into someone who can deliver that as well as the bling.



This is not entirely true.

I am a web designer. And that's what I do. I design (and code) websites.

If a customer wants their website MARKETED (which is what SEO is), they need to find a marketing firm. Which I am not. 

I can design and code a beautiful, practical, fast, user-friendly, SEO capable website. Optimization? Not in my job description.

Also, whether you'll find a particular website in search results is mostly dependent on the name of the company. "T-shirts" has 195,000,000 results. No amount of SEO will put you at the top of that mess. Marketing will bring people to your page.


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## DavidJohnHashman (Apr 21, 2010)

Sarah, would love to get info from you about your web site building but I am way new on computers and dont know how. Thank You, David John.


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## websitestudio (Sep 29, 2010)

i can do it for under $300.


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## DavidJohnHashman (Apr 21, 2010)

Thank You, but I have deceided to have a knoledgable friend help me out to start with. Thanks Again, David John.


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## wrightrac (Sep 29, 2010)

We do websites and here is a link to our pricing Wrightrac Web Design, Wrightrac Printing, Pleasant View TN web design, Pleasant View, TN printing, shirts, business cards, banners, letterhead, envelopes, promotional products, sports uniforms, brochures, postcards, mailers, printing services. If we can help, please feel free to call us at 615-844-3458.

Thanks!


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## DavidJohnHashman (Apr 21, 2010)

Thank You, I have deceided to have a knowledgable friend get me started. Thanks Again, David John.


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## tango9984 (Jul 11, 2008)

David,

Ask your friend that's helping you if he/she knows anything about CMS's. Installing a good Content Management System on your server is a good way to go, because once it's installed and modified to your needs, even the simplest computer user can edit their website. Joomla, Drupal, Modx, Mambo and Expression Engine(not free) are some of the top CMS systems available. Joomla is probably the easiest to use and ModX takes the most coding knowledge. Do some reading on it at joomla.org browse around the modules available to get an idea of the types of things you can integrate.

These CMS's are all aware and friendly for search engine optimization, and if you have no design experience you can install themes quite easily.

Browse some joomla templates at monstertemplate.com just to get an idea of what it's capable of.

I've installed CMS's on servers, and modified a template for _friends_ for 500 dollars(I can finish something like that in 10-14 hours). I'm not sure what your initial designer had in mind, but if that's what he was going to do, then it's possible you can get a nice looking, fully functional, SEO friendly site if that's the case. But to design a "unique" e-commerce site from scratch(from a professional) your looking at 3k-10k, of course all depending what you want it to do.

Good luck, happy hunting.


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## tango9984 (Jul 11, 2008)

smclean06 said:


> This is not entirely true.
> 
> I am a web designer. And that's what I do. I design (and code) websites.
> 
> ...


Actually, this isn't true at all.

SEO is not marketing, it's optimization and it has everything to do with how your site is built. A properly optimized site is designed in a way so search engine robots can easily find, index, and crawl your website to put you in the the search results. If your site is built correctly, and has good content, the search engines will find you without any marketing.

For the short long of it; what puts you on top for certain search terms has to do with the "relevancy" of your site. There are a lot of different factors that play into your relevancy that I don't feel like explaining, but your company's name is not one of them(Unless they are searching your company's name)

SEM is search engine marketing. This is a marketing strategy whereas you pay for search terms so you show up at the top of search engines. Such as googles "sponsored links" box you see at the top of search results.


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## DavidJohnHashman (Apr 21, 2010)

Thank You Kendall, We went with 1&1 to start out with, no long term contract. My budget right now is almost zero, so I just want to get something easy up and running, enough so that someone looking for our domain name can at least find us. As revenues grow (hopefully) I can look at upgrading the site and better search engine optimization. Thanks Again, David John.


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## mdurkee (May 16, 2010)

Check out this package that you can buy from SmartWin Technology 
The pricing for the package is less than $300.00 and with a little editing (you may need to hire someone) you can have a nice database driven eCommerce website for less than a couple thousand dollars.


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## vadan (Mar 9, 2010)

tango9984 said:


> Actually, this isn't true at all.
> 
> SEO is not marketing, it's optimization and it has everything to do with how your site is built. A properly optimized site is designed in a way so search engine robots can easily find, index, and crawl your website to put you in the the search results. If your site is built correctly, and has good content, the search engines will find you without any marketing.
> 
> ...


I fully agree. Can I add SEO also looks at site structure and coding. If you have a clean, well structured website this affects the way your site is seen when being indexed. There's also a higher potential for exposure as search engines favour clean websites. By clean I mean not flooded with duplicate keywords, unnecessary tags, excess code, rubbish navigation. 

SEM for example would be pay per click, banner exchange.


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## Navubi (Jul 16, 2010)

Be careful that the web master is not selling you template designs. I know a lot of people who are downloading templates for free and selling them for around $500. You should consider hosting and domain costs also


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## imindless (Jul 13, 2010)

Honestly, look at their portfolio. It will tell if they are good or not. I have a friend who is very good at graphic design, he also codes. $500 is cheap but I have seen REALLY good, well thought-out websites done for $500. Since I used to do all that, I have a worldly opinion than most, who have not. 

I have a friend who does GREAT work and can make your site look extremely professional as well as eye catching. He actually recently did the logo for the brand that I am currently working on. 

I think for a website he charges at minimum $500, and can go up to $2,000, if on contract, it would be that high, like one hes doing for his city. If you are interested you can PM me and I can get a good deal for you probably and give you his portfolio.


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## delarosa (Oct 2, 2010)

I design websites at Puerto Rico and I usually start billing at $500.00 but can bill $5k, $10K etc. The price of a website depends on the design and what (coding) is required to get what you want to do with your website done.


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