Yes, Websites Cost More Than Fifty Bucks

Hmm, are the Nazi color themes a free extra?<p>Yes, websites are not free, but it's low hanging fruit, you see? There is very little barrier to entry, a lot of people know about them, and info on how to make them is readily available.<p>As a developer, I would not want to invest my entire future in websites.

I agree with him to a point; that point is probably about the $60 an hour charge limit.<p>We charge $55 - $70 per hour for custom work; I think that is a reasonable expense. I've seen quotes from competitors that work out at anything from (assuming they took the same number of hrs) $120 to $300 an hour.<p>That's silly; I really cant imagine they can give a small or medium business any <i>extra</i> value or quality we could.<p>(once branding comes into it, and really big companies etc. I agree prices do climb; and rightly so, but I get the impression that's not really what he's talking about)

I just left a company (College, actually) with this problem. They had no idea what a great website would cost, so they constantly balked at the prices. Unfortunately, they have a very poor website (as does most of higher education) due to their unwillingness to spend.<p>Having been in on the bid process, I can tell you that the prices were not at all unreasonable. The major problem in the cost being too high was that the College has no willingness to maintain the site themselves. Those hours of maintenance and updating are the expensive part, and add up fast.

This may be me, but I can't see any company needing a website that costs "tens of thousands of dollars or more" not being better off hiring someone for in house work. At the rates people are talking about in this thread, say a $15,000 website design should be taking around 250 hours, or around 2 months of work for a single employee. If you're going to invest a quarter of the yearly salary for a web designer in your site, its probably going to be in your best interest to just hire one so they you don't have to keep contracting out every time you need a change made.<p>Mind you, I can see the preference towards just doing a one off contract to have it made, but only if your site is going to remain relatively static. Each time you want to make a change to it though, you'll have to re-hire someone to do the work, or try to hack it together in house. If you're going to be actively developing the site though, (I would prefer to) have the designer in house, so he can weigh in during the design meetings for other things too.

I agree with the basic premise of this article, but saying "99% of the time that quote will be a reasonable price" is disingenuous. While some customers that do not know the value web development expect to pay too little, they are just as likely to get overcharged by opportunistic developers.<p>It is much like getting car repairs. If you go in informed, you are likely to get a fair price, whereas if you don't you may be taken advantage of.

This is a hold over from the last few people who Just Don't Get It. (It being the Internet)<p>They'll be gone soon.

"A gifted amateur might do a decent job for a friend’s site. It’s rarely a good business option. You can also get great design for cheap prices by choosing templated options. Some of them are excellent. The Twicet template on ThemeForest costs $35. That price is economical for the designers because they’ve sold nearly 1,000 copies. That’s cool, but it means there are 1,000 websites out there that all look pretty much the same. That’s your choice for dirt cheap web design – amateur, or a template." Great stuff!