the Cost of Web Site Design Services

For the price we paid we received 50 person-hours of design and testing time from a medium-sized web-design company for work our corporate website and online store.

Hosting and domain services, as well as site maintenance contracts are also available at extra cost, though the company contracts those functions out to other local businesses.

Were it not for the prohibition on sharing company names, I'd simply post a link to the site that was created for us. It seems secure, bug free, easy to navigate, and not to mention utterly gorgeous. Though it took longer than our IT guy projected, it was actually ahead of the schedule the design company proposed. I'm ecstatic to say the least.

Contracting out the creation of a website is expensive. This seems odd to many people because the tools are available pretty inexpensively, though they get the idea that oil paints and canvasses are relatively inexpensive and widely available, but a Rembrandt is expensive.

The price, unless entirely obscene, reflects the skill of the designer(s) and programmer(s) who work(s) on the project. A design firm should have available a portfolio of either established clients' sites that they've created, or examples of the work skills (only acceptable if the company is very new and none of their clients sites have gone live yet).

The best gauge of a web site design firm is whether their site, and the sites they've created for clients, mimics the look and function of the site you want. Once you've found a few of those, call up their clients (maybe get a list of references from the design company you're considering so you don't catch their clients unaware) and ask them how their site is holding up and whether they think it was worth the price they paid.