How much does web design cost?

Getting a quote for your web design project is often daunting and confusing. However, it doesn’t have to be if you know how the process works upfront.

Successful web design is complex.

Truely effective and successful website design projects are ones that are tailored to the unique wants and needs of your business.

No two website design projects are the same, which is the reason quotes vary from project to project so greatly.

Web designers often struggle to effectively quote on projects due to this huge variance, which ends up confusing them and you.

Fortunately, the quoting process that most good web designers and agencies follow is relatively similar.

In this episode, I clarify the web design quoting process, covering three key areas:

1. How the cost of a web project is calculated
2. Why web design quotes vary so greatly
3. An example of a real website project quote, and where the cost all goes

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT BELOW

This is the Web3 podcast about attracting, engaging and converting more customers on your website.

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the second episode of attract, engage, and convert. Today we’re going to talk about what you should expect to pay for web design services in Australia. Alright let’s start the show.

So here’s the thing pricing for web design services comes in a huge variety, businesses often struggle to understand why websites cost what they do. More importantly, web designers as an agency typically struggle to effectively price for their web design services, which just adds to the confusion.

So in this episode we’re going to cover three key things.

Number one: how is the cost of the web project calculated,

Number two: why web design quotes vary so greatly and

Number three: an example of a real web design agency quote that we have created for a recent project of ours.

So how is the cost of web projects calculated? Well there is two core frameworks or two different ways that web designers and agencies typically take when it comes to pricing for project.

Number one is value -based pricing, which is something that personally we do not do at web3 nor is very common play for most agencies.

The second way is the good old money for time, that is you want something done here’s how long it takes, here’s our hourly rates, this is the cost and this is the type of pricing formula that we apply to the mass majority of projects that we do here at Web3 has with many other agencies in and around Australia.

There is a couple other areas that factor in when it comes to pricing for website projects, for example, additional expenses such as domain names and website hosting.

So overall it seems pretty straightforward but why then is there such a huge variance when it comes to price?

Well let’s dig a bit deeper here. So why is it that Web design quotes vary so greatly? There is really for key areas that define the price of a web design quote. The first area is the quality of work, now you can type into Google cheap web design, affordable web design and you will be met with no shortage of companies or web designers selling these types of services.

Put simply, you get what you pay for. If you don’t believe me just do it, pause this podcast type in cheap or affordable web design into Google and then just see the type of results that you get.

See the type of portfolios and case studies that turn up. Most cases, it’s pretty low quality work, as I mentioned you get what you pay for. As with many other industries. It’s no different with web design.

The second area that cases web design quotes to vary is simply supply and demand. Now referencing that with Web3, since starting we’ve always been pretty darn busy, as with most of the businesses when the demand for wok outweighs the supply naturally, the cost of the alley right that calculates goes up to meet the demand in the market until you find that sweet spot.

What’s important to understand here is that if a web designer or an agency is in low demands, then it typically means that they are selling for really cheap services, which also directly correlates with their work of not being very high-quality. The exception of this is if the agency or web designer is new, they might be able to produce an excellent work, but when it actually comes to delivering an awesome customer service experience. They might not know how to do that because they simply have had the experience of an established agency.

The thirds point is how establish the agency is, are they brand new into the block Do they have any proven track record, any clients at all? Typically the agencies that have been around for a long time that do have a proven track record and can back up their claims and their services with real results can justify charging more for their services compared to a company that is just started, just formed up. Now you can decide to walk with a brand-new company in order to save price, but you run the inherent risk of that company not being able to deliver the work or stay in business for the longevity of your project.

I’ve seen this happen many, many times where clients have come to us. Well, they simply have worked with a web designer that went out of business midway through that project, but simply the more established the agency the longer that they’ve been in the market for, typically the higher their price will be, but that price can be justified with a high-quality of work a proven process, a proven product and a proven service.

Now the fourth point is the overhead of the agency. How many staff does the agency have?

Do they have a big swank office in the middle of the city that costs a lot of money over head to keep up and running?

Typically, you’ll find big agencies with lots of people in a big office have to price their services higher than what an agency with a small team, with a small office or no office at all can because they simply need to cover the overhead.

Now you may be wanting to have the full wine and dine experience where you can go into the office have coffee, made by a barrister etc. etc. etc.

But do keep in mind that you will be needing to pay for those services. If you’re not looking for all the bells and whistles and free coffee galore then you can typically save money by working with an agency that’s either setup to be remote or set up to be agile and flexible and location independent.

The other area that reflects the pricing of web design services is the hourly rate and well that hourly rate goes. So I’ll give an example, our hourly rate at Web3 is hundred twenty dollars Australian including GST.

It has been like that for quite some time however during times that we’ve been in incredibly strong demand, we do prop it up a little bit, probably up to around 130.

When we’re looking to on-board a lot of new clients rapidly, then we tend to drop that down to ninety seven dollars. But the median operating price that we quote on is hundred twenty dollars.

The hundred and twenty dollars might sound like a lot of money to you. Let me take a step back and break down where that hundred and twenty goes, covering things like wages, holiday pay, office over heads, hardware cost, software costs. The profit percentage from an hourly rate so we are not only been able to break even, but be able take home a little bit of money at the end of the day like any other good sustainable business should be able to.

As you can see there’s a lot that goes into defining an hourly rate and one other thing particularly that gets missed a lot is the complexity and the features required to complete a successful outcome of the project.

This is often one of the biggest areas of confusion which I’ll give you an example, an enquiry came through not so recently where they were looking for a simple online store. I went through and broken down with them, which I’ll briefly breakdown now. A simple online store might look simple on the surface, but when you dig into it you need to be able to set up and manage the payment gateways integration with things such as PayPal, such as Visa and MasterCard. You need to be able to build out a check out feature, a shopping cart feature, the payments shop notifications, e-mail notifications when new customer orders, updates, changes to the billing log, shopping cart abandonments, having a profile that people can track their order logs from and the ability to update their profile when necessary. Change their billing details, change their address details, their postage details and so so so much more.

If I can parallel out recently where I took my car in for a service at the local mechanic and I was quoted twelve hundred dollars to change one of its core leathers which Ii thought was quite a lot considering it was just changing one part, but yet did I know that to be able to do something like this, they need to be able to not only by the part from the manufacturer, cover the labour cost to change it and fit it, but then also rebalance the entire car wheel alignment, be able to test it Etc. etc. etc. the point I’m trying to make is, is that web design is not as simple as many people may think. To be able to really achieve a high quality successful results. It is time-consuming and complex process. If you’re wanting to see a high-quality result achieved.

So to put all of this theory into practice, I’m willing to give you a real life web design project that we have landed and currently working on right now.

The website project was to be able to redesign and build a completely custom Word press website with a backend intranet system as well together in one project. The project was six thousand nine hundred dollars including tax. Now, where does that all go, let me explain. Initial strategy sessions be able to define the outcomes of the project and the strategy and what needs to be done on the website. Two hours 2 by 120 is $240. Wireframing four hours five. Site mapping, one hour, WordPress set up three hours, theme development 8 hours, theme design, nine hours, content and imagery and optimization and population – four hours, mobile optimisation four hours, revisions six hours, quality assurance four hours, cross browser testing five hours, cross device testing three hours, transfer and launch with the completed website and intranet four and a half hours, although that was a brief overview, there was approximately thirty nine individual task that needed to be completed in order to achieve that project incomplete matter of transparency and something that I think would help really understand the level of work that goes into a success, web design project is a link up to the show notes, a screen dump of our project board inside trello that has these 39  individual toss outline with many many many macro task. In total it was 57 and a half hours to complete that project, fifty seven and a half times one twenty if six thousand nine hundred dollars and that’s where arrive to the price.

So to summarise the three core things that define the price of web design services, is how the web design you know agency prices the project, is it value-based, is a time based.

The second point is the variety and web design quotes which really boils down to four key things, and in my experience and opinion which is the quality of work supply and demand, how established the agency is and the over heads of the agency and the third part finally, as I gave you an example of a real working web design project where you can see the cost and time, and where that all goes.

I hope that has been really helpful for you again thank you so much for listening. If you’ve enjoy this podcast, please hit that subscribe up the job. Also feel free to share this on social media like and comment on the blog post, and any other way that you can show some love. Frankly we appreciate it. Thank you so much we’ll be in touch.

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