How Much Does It Cost to Design a Website?

It's no secret that design plays an important role in shaping the opinion of your site. According to Google, users spend 0.05 seconds evaluating a site and leave it if they don't like the design.

The average price for professional web design ranges from $1,000 to $ 100,000 and goes up. Until you decide on the number of web pages, features, whether it's a new website or if you're redesigning an old one, no designer gives you an exact price.
Let's find out more about the components of web design and what affects the cost.

What Impacts the Cost of Website Design

Factors impacting the website design cost are website complexity, adaptation for different devices, and a designer’s salary. If you want to reduce the design time and save costs to build a website, draw up a list with product requirements.
So, let's consider each factor in detail.

Complexity

If you want to create a corporate or e-commerce site like Amazon, it'll cost more and take longer than creating a landing page. To create a website from scratch, designers need more time to build unique web pages, learn a target audience, and analyze competitors.

Even landing pages can be of varying complexity, depending on whether you add complex animation or a large number of elements. If designers have all the necessary content, they won't have to draw anything, and they'll be able to create such a page in 6-8 hours, and it’ll cost approximately $300-$400 (with a $50 rate per hour for Eastern Europe).

For example, look at the simple page below created by Shopify.

 

If you want to create content for mockups and add images, it'll take a designer 16 to 20 hours and cost approximately $800-$1,000.

To create a website like Apple's Mac Pro, with a complex 3D animation and lots of elements, the cost of design can be $4,000 to $5,000 (depending on the vendors), it may take around 80-100 hours.

Responsiveness

How about making your site look great on mobile devices? Now mobile devices account for about half of the world's web traffic. One more reason to create a responsive website is if you want it to rank well on the Google SERP. Besides, 72.9% of all purchases will be made from smartphones in 2021, allowing you to get additional revenue.

A responsive website layout expands or shrinks based on the user's display width. You don't need to create a separate mobile version if you make the website responsive. Such websites switch according to the resolution and shrink or expand automatically when users switch from their PCs to smartphones.

Responsive website design creation takes approximately 40% of full website design development time. If you decide to create a website like Netflix, it’ll take 168 hours and cost $8400, 48 hours and $2,400 to make this design responsive.

Labor costs

Web designer's wage varies depending on the taxes, salaries, and office rental costs in the region of residency. Western Europe and the United States are regions with one of the highest salaries for designers. For comparison, designers from Asia or Eastern Europe are sometimes twice as cheap.

Here are UX/UI designers’ hourly rates in different regions:

• In Asia ‒ $25-36

• In Eastern Europe ‒ $35-$56

• In Latin America ‒ $40-$50

• In the USA ‒ $79-$163

Vendor

Let’s review the following options that affect the website design cost.

Hire a freelancer.

You can hire a freelancer when you need to create a simple website or landing page. It isn't reliable to choose a freelancer to work on a large and complex product as they can abandon it anytime.

Hiring a freelancer, you need to know exactly how many pages you need the list of features, know your users, and their behavior.

Work with the agency.

Working with an agency is more expensive than hiring a freelancer ‒ the more qualified designers they have, the more expensive their work is. It's good to cooperate with an agency because a full-fledged team works on your product, including developers, project managers, and business analysts. The agency also signs the contract and takes responsibility for its work.

Use a ready-made template.

Templates suit you if you want to save money and create a simple website. You can create a website and manage it using WordPress, Magento or any other CMS. You won’t spend much, but you may have to pay for additional services such as add-ons, icons, themes. Besides, such websites are often not responsive, have limited customization options and security issues.
It'll cost you between $1,500 and $5,000 to create something more complex, for example, on WordPress, because you have to pay designers and developers who’ll help you customize it.

Website Design Cost Components

Let's see what the website design cost is made up of in case you hire an agency. Agencies typically split their work into different phases to accurately deliver their customer’s vision and ideas. So you’ll see the approximate cost of each phase.

Discovery phase.

The discovery phase begins before product development. First, negotiations are held with the client, then a list of functions, design requirements, frameworks, and interactive prototypes based on them are created, the minimum and maximum amount of time and money for the website development are estimated approximately.

If the client likes everything, project managers, UX/UI designers, and business analysts estimate the amount of money and time for the planning phase.
The cost of the discovery phase depends on project complexity.

Concept design.

After the layout approval, the website concept is created. The design team provides the client with several website pages with different styles, and colors and the client picks one.
The design concept development takes 16-20 hours and its cost may vary from $800 to $1,000.

Designers can create the design concept without brand style guide, for example, by competition or user preferences. If they have a brand style guide, it’ll save 3 hours and $150 on color palette, 4 hours and $200 on typography, and will be a good source for choosing custom illustrations.

Visual design.

If the client doesn't have a brand style guide, it’s created in this phase. It helps to know exactly how to use elements and various states like hoovers, errors, and what colors to apply to them.

Creating mockups is the most difficult phase. If you want your project to be both a website and mobile app, you need to design each model. It’s not enough to create one authorization screen - you need to design what happens if the user enters incorrect data. After that, the agency reconciles each screen with the client and makes changes as requested.

Additional services.

As additional services, the client can request to make adaption for several languages or responsive web design. This should be agreed upon at the beginning of the planning phase. The last step is estimating the time designers need and the full website development cost calculating.

My name is Katherine Orekhova and I am a technical writer at Cleveroad - a mobile app development company. I'm keen on technology and innovations. My passion is to tell people about the latest tech trends in the world of IT.

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