Website Development Costs
Hiring a professional web developer or web development company involves paying a highly skilled individual, or team, for their time and effort. As such, web development costs can be high. Not only do web developers spend years learing a highly specialised craft but they must also continue honing their skills and keeping abreast of changing environments and trends throughout their careers. No wonder then that they charge a high hourly rate.
Of course, to the business owner with a website to build this is of little consideration. What you require is hard figures for costing up your project.
Unfortunately we can't provide them - in fact, we think they're pretty much impossible to provide. While an average daily rate for a web developer in the UK may fall into the £300-£400 range, until your project is properly spec-ed out with a detailed brief, there's no way of telling the size of the quotes you'll get back.
Factors Influencing Web Development Costs
The cost of a web development project depends on a lot more factors than just the number of pages. There are many different types of development challenges that might be encountered and countless ways of finding a solution. The use of different programming languages and platforms provide different approaches to achieving the same end result.
Some of the challenges you might require a web developer to overcome include:
- Publishing, managing and editing content
- Integrating social media
- Providing tracking and web analytics
- Integrating an ecommerce solution and payment gateway
- Making use of a database or CRM system for displaying information on the site
- Feeding user data into such a backend system
- Providing forums, blogs, comments etc
- Providing a secure login for users
- Allowing user generated content
- Providing user-specific content
- Creating an API so that customers can access your data directly
- ...
There are of course many more. Some of these will have pre-existing solutions that a developer can simply tailor for your business while others will require coding from scratch and therefore cost a lot more to develop.
Heirarchy of Web Development Skills
Roughly speaking, the further you go down the following list the rarer the skills become and the more you can expect to pay for them:
- HTML
- JavaScript
- CSS
- XHTML
- Content Management Systems
- E-commerce
- .NET
- C#
- ASP.NET
- jQuery
- SQL Server
- SQL
- HTML5
- Ajax
- XML
- Java
- PHP
- Agile Software Development
- MVC
- MySQL
- OO
- CSS3
- .NET Framework
If that list means as much to you as it does to us then by now you've probably realised that the only way to cost up that web development project realistically is to draw up a detailed brief and get it before a selection of real-life web developers.
For more information on that process and for tips on choosing a web developer, read our more in-depth Web Development Buyers' Guide.
