With the current trend of internet marketing and selling and buying goods online, every person, business and company is looking forward to have their own websites. The first thing most people would like to know is how much the development process will cost them. If you are looking forward to owning a website, you do not have to worry because costs of owning one have reduced drastically. From 1995 to 1997, the cost of web development for a single site was between 7500 and 12000 dollars. The cost came down to between 6000 and 10000 dollars. In the following four years, the cost dropped to between 2500 and 4500 dollars while towards 2010, the costs dropped to between 1000 and 5000 dollars.
Web development has many processes and elements which vary in cost. Domain name costs vary depending on the providers. Most web host companies charge about nine dollars for a year; other hosts may charge higher or lower costs. The cost of web hosting varies depending on the features of the website and the number of updates you require. Some websites are very demanding as they require regular updates. It is not a wonder to find a website that requires to be updated every day or every few days. Such a site will cost much more compared to a site that does not require regular updates. Cost of maintenance depending on the updates ranges between five hundred and one thousand five hundred dollars.
Websites are different depending on the amount of graphics, images and media they have. Websites with a lot of graphics consume a lot of bandwidth compared to websites that do not have any graphics. Such sites will be charged higher by the web hosting company. The number of pages and amount of traffic to the site also determines the cost of development. Sites with many web pages and high traffic are also charged higher.
Another source of variation in the cost of web development is the purpose of the website. If you have a personal website that you use for forums, reviews and discussions, the cost should be much lower. Such sites are very simple with one or a few pages without graphics. The only thing that may inflate the cost of such a site is traffic because such sites usually have a lot of traffic. Â Project of creating a personal site with basic features only should take between one and two months and the cost should not be more than six thousand dollars.
The cost of corporate and ecommerce websites is much higher compared to the personal sites. Corporate sites usually have between 25 and 75 pages, use heavy flash and require extra content like calendar, intranet and search options. Such a site would take almost three months to develop and would therefore costs between 10,000 and 25,000 dollars. On the other hand, ecommerce website depends on the number of products outlined in the website. A typical ecommerce website has between 100 and 1000 products listed with their descriptions. The site also has checkout and payment gateway integration as well as client’s control panel and shipping information. Such a site would take up to four months to develop and would therefore cost between 5,000 and 15,000 dollars.