What does a good website cost?

The cost of producing a website is the web industry’s oldest challenge. While certainly not exclusive to the digital industry, this issue has conjured a range of controversy, preconceptions, misconceptions and even legal disputes since the dawn of the commercial web.

Focusing too heavily on price is a risky prospect. We’ve had clients leave for price reasons, only to return later after ‘cheaper’ had cost them more in the long-run. So much of this financial (and literal) headache could have been prevented with a better understanding of how websites can vary so wildly in price, quality and return on investment.

In writing this article, we want to clear up some of the industry-wide confusion and offer guidance as to why a digital project, in our opinion, costs what it does. We’ll cover the key factors of value, complexity, longevity, technical debt, and opportunity cost, all of which influence both the initial price and what you make back from the final product over time.

What should a good great website do?

Ultimately, a great website contributes to the success of your campaign, business, and brand. Most of our clients measure this success in terms of sales, donations, customer enquiries, and other types of conversion – but you can also use secondary performance metrics like brand perception, employee satisfaction, NPS, average order value, and more.

Great websites are created bespoke, featuring essential functionality and integrations that address the aims of your users within the context of your business goals. These sites load fast, scale seamlessly (hello, TV ad tie-ins and Hackernews hugs!), and deliver an approachable, professional face to your audience without being burdened by their own complexity.

From what we’ve seen, off-the-shelf solutions fail when they’re used thoughtlessly, without appreciation for the audience, brand or market. In such cases, they tend to come bloated with unnecessary features and low-effort content, creating an online experience that’s nowhere near as engaging or effective as it could be.

It’s fair to say a great website is the output of time spent understanding your users, your business, your industry, and your project’s needs and objectives, leading to remarkable returns on your investment along with longer-lasting success. It's the effort invested both in understanding the challenge well enough to plan an incisive solution, and then carefully crafting that solution in detail.

What actually goes into making a website?

Research and discovery

This is where we dive deep (but only as deep as we need to) into the world of your web project – what it means to you, what it’ll mean to your users. Every agency approaches this differently, but for us it entails workshops, project alignment, validation of assumptions, and thoroughly qualifying an idea to prove it’s worth following through.

Definition and planning

At this stage, we connect research with production to create the website experience and underlying structure. Expect to see user journeys and experience maps, information architecture plans, page-level content plans, and wireframes. In some cases where a site is naturally complex, we may also produce interactive prototypes for early discussion and testing of ideas.

Design

Here’s where we introduce brand elements, visual styling, interaction and dynamic detail, seek feedback on the actual user interface, and craft the design system that determines your aesthetic and interactive approach. Alongside this focus on UX and engagement, we ensure there’s a strong theme to your design to support both extensibility over time and usability through intuitive and consistent presentation.

Development

“Development” is the umbrella term for the distinct and separate disciplines involved in crafting a website: front end, back end, service integrations, quality assurance, accessibility, SEO, and performance. All of these areas together channel the efforts from prior stages into a physical product (in a manner of speaking) that both people and other systems can interact with.

Content, writing and media

Content encompasses your words, images, video and other expressions of your business and product. It’s what engages your visitors, and a bit part of how they’ll define the quality of their experience with you. This stage isn’t just for the preparation of content, it also covers the strategy around it and how it evolves over time.

Project oversight

Realistically, projects need careful planning and orchestration to ensure they’re delivered on time and within budget, while staying aligned to the overall project goals. Defining your scope at the start isn’t a set-and-forget deal – those requirements, boundaries and success criteria must be prioritised and defended all the way through from beginning to end.

So, where does cost come from?

In a nutshell: complexity. Anything unique, bespoke, or otherwise diverging from the most common patterns creates complexity. Work that requires care, focus and careful integration creates complexity. Behind some of the web's most famously intuitive experiences inevitably lies a paper trail of research, planning, testing, review and response.

If you want a solution tailored to your audience, this tends to involve crafting at least a few custom features from the ground up. If timeframes are tighter than usual, production will need more immediate resources to meet a rushing deadline. This in turn requires more project oversight to maintain quality and project alignment.

Ironically, a quick project that lacks focus on quality can turn into a more expensive product over the longer term. It might not appear to at the start, but will soon accrue high costs through technical debt, higher ongoing maintenance needs, dated functionality, and inadequate planning for the future.

Cost is a poor marker for project success

The right question to ask is ‘what does great look like?’ Or better yet:

What does great look like for me and my audience?

Cost is a realistic concern, but investing in quality usually comes with more compelling cost savings over time. Cost competitiveness and template-based pricing inevitably creates a race to the bottom, where quality, meaning and genuine value are too quickly sacrificed to create the appearance of saving.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of website pricing – anyone who tells you different is likely neglecting or misinterpreting your need for quality.

Start your project by thinking about your goals and what value you can generate with a website that effectively engages your visitors. What outcomes would you like to see? What pain points do you intend to fix? Taking this approach nurtures a different kind of conversation and vision, one that gives you more flexibility in what you can accomplish with your money.