I want your help in determining the estimated website design cost of my imminent business which is primarily an online mobile repairing services website with an e-commerce-based mobile accessories shop.
Cost will definitely depends on your specific requirements, and the web agency.
For example, for the mobile repair side, are customers able to schedule a date/time for the repair and have to enter in their location? Does there need to be a system in place to ensure there's no double bookings?
That's just the tip of the iceberg, but a good web agency will dig in deep and ask you a lot of questions in a discovery session to determine your requirements, so that they can propose a solution that'll meet your needs.
The first step is find a web agency who has experience building similar websites. Then, have a conversation with them. Look for professionalism, clear communication and honesty. Ask if they have a minimum project budget. If they check all those boxes, consider paying them to do a discovery session to help you determine all of your requirements (paying for 2-5 hours should be enough). This is a useful exercise for you as well, so that you are clear about what you really need (even if you don't end up using this agency).
After that, the agency could put together a proposal for you.
Generally speaking, a website of this nature will not be less than $3K to build. It could easily be upwards of $20K, depending on all your needs.
Your best bet is to keep things as simple as possible, and launch with the essentials rather than building everything at once.
Use tools like Squarespace, LemonStand or Shopify to get a lot of features out of the box and reduce development cost. After launching, gather qualitative feedback from customers, and measure traffic patterns and conversion rates using Google Analytics. This data can tell you what to change, add or remove from your website. That way, you're building what customers actually want without just making guesses.
Best of luck on your project!
Hello!
This is a great question! Many of my clients here at www.Unthink.me typically start off with this question because there are many different price points that simply add to the confusion. The short answer to your question is that most designers will price what they think their time is worth, not what the commodity or service is actually worth whether is priced by the market or others in the industry. That is why a website with no e-commerce could go for either a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.
Depending on the designer selling it and the person buying the web design service. As Unthink we do websites of all sorts from a few hundred dollars to hundredths of thousands for our larger clients.
Please keep in mind that your business shouldn't drive the cost of the website. Features and upgrades do, however, but it does not mean they come or should come at a high price. If you want an e-commerce capability, you can try site builder like Shopify or even something like Wordpress with a theme like Avada - these are not super simple to pull off but with some technical capabilities you should be able to get things done. If you hire a designer to help you with these, the cost should also be significantly lower.
Web design has become a commodity, don't get charged for it like its a luxury. Web designers need the income to compete against cheaper alternatives which is why most over price their time.
Here is a quick briefing on your website. If you agree with it, take the price I mention below as a good estimate. If you feel you need less, take a bit off the price... And if you need more features then you'll add, of course.
The website shall communicate your brand visually, and therefore the designer / developer shall spend time with you to understand your brand and the desired expression. you will also have to spend time to understand the desired "flow" on the website... Every visit should absolutely lead the visitor to an invitation to purchase or to book the repair service.
When this is done, the framework of the website can be designed and build in Wordpress or in something else. The developer / designer should add connections to your social media channels, opportunities for your visitors to engage et cetera.
The shop shall be built including an easy way for you to add products, update prices and shipping options, perform simple maintenance of your shop and monitor the shop's performance. The developer shall also integrate PDF invoicing, printing of shipping labels, and possibly a connection to your accounting system. I would assume you will be uploading the products, their images, and their data yourself.
The website seems to be largely finished now and can be tested, which takes time as you will have comments that will have to be implemented. The website also needs to be optimized: for speed and for security. The developer will have to be an expert in both fields, so your website will not be attacked and will be fast to load for everyone who visits.
Since you will want to be found in Google and the other search engines as well, your developer shall be an expert in "SEO" - Search Engine Optimization. And you will also want to get the daily and weekly analytics of the web site visits.
If hosting should be part of the offer to you, you will be looking for a certain bandwidth, server performance, memory and number of processors, with how many websites you share the server. If you want to do maintenance afterwards yourself, perhaps FTP/SFTP access to the hosting server.
Finally, do not forget some training on how to use the CMS (Content Management System), and perhaps an additional offer to perform maintenance and updates once the website has been launched.
Your briefing could include more, but based on the above I will develop the strategy with you, the design and the "construction" of the website and the shop, the hardening and security of it, and the hosting on our server. We will also help you to find a great domain name and register it on your name.
This way, it is a pleasant and inspiring process for you, with great involvement but no worries about the realization.
All included this will cost $ 6,000 plus a small monthly maintenance fee after the first year if you decide not to move your website away from our server. There is no need to pay anything in advance; as the work progresses you will look at our dev version and once finished we hand over to you and you make the payment.
As said, it could be more or less, depending on what your requirements are. But hopefully this helps you to think about how to brief a developer, and if you want to find out more, just let me know!
