Even if you ignore factors such as web-hosting cost and the expense of a domain name, web-site development prices can vary immensely. From our experience we can give you rough numbers though.
For the sake of estimates, lets assume you are a small start-up business and you are seeking a web designer / webmaster.
How much should you expect to pay a website designer / webmaster? According to salary.com which calculates the estimates of what an individual in a career makes, the numbers are as follow:
Lowest 10%, either self-taught or 2-year degree with no or very limited experience: $21.58 / hour, or a yearly salary of $44,877.
Median 50%, 4-year degree with experience: $29.73 / hour, or a yearly salary of $61,838.
High 90% 4-year degree or greater with high amount of experience: $39.48 / hour, or a yearly salary of $82,099.
On the cheap end you could take a CMS (content management system, which is like a program that serves as a website and you can customize the look) and installing it in a few minutes you would have a bare-bones website. Assuming you found a hosting service that had ‘one-click’ install, this could be done for free and done fairly easy. Learning how to modify the content of the website will most likely become an issue, but we will ignore this element at this stage. Assuming it was a payed job, it is hard to imagine anyone hiring someone to do this task for more than an hour or two worth of work.
You can’t use a bare-bones website though, you need some sort of structure and design to it. If you used a ‘free’ design template, then you could probably have this done for $100 or $200-$300 with a designer template that is unmodified. You save money because you aren’t employing any specialty skills from anyone and you do not need any customization. And you can estimate with the rates above the cost of customizing this starting point.
On the most expensive end is a custom built website from scratch, programmed by a highly educated and experienced developer and/or teams. I’ve seen quotes for a small-business website by these circumstances ranging from $1000-$5000. You are paying for an experienced worker to create a highly customized product.
We like to offer our customers a special compromise. Our specialized team has years of experience, working on large-scale projects and smaller projects. We improvise by starting with a CMS base, optimizing it (MISSING LINK) then installing and customizing a premium theme. We then integrate our own research on SEO (search engine optimization, MISSING LINK) along with our security package (MISSING LINK). There is no limit to the customization – we have the same experience (just a smaller team) as large web-design firms. Specialized forms, catalogues, database integration, specialized web-applications – we have made them all.