Free Website Costs Calculator

Website Costs Factors

The costs associated with a professionally-designed website can vary depending on the bells and whistles. As a starting point we’ve identified a few key website costs factors that set a baseline of costs.

Estimated number of pages

The number of pages a website has is an important factor related to the development hours necessary to make it a reality. Basic websites usually have five pages – home, about, services, contact us, and some core privacy policy or terms and conditions pages. More streamlined websites may also have numerous blogs.

The amount of blogs a site has may not necessarily need to be included into the final costs if they are able to be exported and imported into a new site. For example, many Content Management System (CMS) websites will allow a very simple export/import process for blogs which negates the need for a developer to “touch” each page. While this is difficult to estimate in a simple website design calculator, it is something that would come up in conversations with you.

That said, you may want to consider negating the total amount of blogs you have on your site when doing your calculations.

If you have a big website you are looking to rebuild and are unsure of the amount of pages, type in “site:example.com” into a search engine and you’ll get an estimate of the amount of indexed pages.

Number of pages copywritten

When building a new website you have an opportunity to really make it custom and build out the pages you want your visitors to read. Therefore, you may want to enlist the help of professional copywriting experts like those at Digital Elevator.

We generally charge around $200 per page of professionally written content. As a general rule, we recommend static pages (service pages, resource pages, etc.) be at least 400 words although we generally shoot for slightly more. These pages are written based on keyword research, competitive analysis, buyer persona research, and the incorporation of your call to actions.

Style of design

The style of design is a very important aspet of website design because it will determine how much graphic design, animation, and customization is incorporated into your site. As a rule of thumb, the more of these elements you want, the more the costs of the design will go up.

We bucket the style of design into four categories:

1. Modern yet simple
2. Tailored design
3. Signature design
4. Fully-custom aesthetic

Modern yet simple

Our definition of a modern yet simple web design entails a website that is professional, cohesive with branding and font types, and has minimal functionality or integrations outside of general contact forms. 

These sites look great but they don’t include the custom graphic design or animation that truly tailored designs include. Some examples of modern yet simple websites include these:

• Example A
• Example B

Tailored design

A website that has a tailored design is for brands that have a very established branding guide that they need to follow. Tailored designs include a good amount of graphic design incorporated into the site, often through custom iconography, graphics that use brand colors and are 100% unique to the site, and other animations that can be found throughout the site.

Expect a very strong cohesiveness based on primary brand colors as well as subtle designs incorporated into backgrounds, subsections, and even on the menu and footer.

Some examples of tailored design styles include:

• Example A
• Example B
• Example C

Signature design

A signature design from Digital Elevator entails a very high level of customization in nearly every aspect of the website. Whereas lesser design styles may incorporate moderate customization throughout, a signature design entails customization on nearly every page, section, and subsection.

Expect premium, high end fonts; custom iconography built just for the website; custom graphics based on your products, services, or tools; and a design that is distinctly yours and completely unique on the internet. 

Some examples of signature design styles include:

• Example A
• Example B

Fully-custom aesthetic

Websites that want a fully-custom aesthetic are the creme-de-la-creme of the design world. While the design styles are subjective, the emphasis on customization, a distinctly unique design, highly custom graphic design, animation, and visuals are what makes these sites a step above the rest.

Often the combination of seasoned graphic designers, photographers, videographers, and developers, these websites evoke immediate feelings of trust and are what you’d expect from household brands in terms of design, user experience, and subconscious levels of trust.

Some examples of fully-custom design styles include:

• Example A
• Example B

Of course, web design is based a conversation about goals, functionality, look, feel, branding, and budget. Our team will talk with you about all the above to strategically design and develop a website that blows you away.

eCommerce functionality

There are a wealth of eCommerce platforms to choose from these days and Digital Elevator can help you determine which platforms best suit your needs. We segment eCommerce functionality into four buckets:

• None
• Basic
• Advanced 
• Enterprise

With Advanced and Enterprise eCommerce functionality there are generally a lot of automations and integrations that need to incorporated. These may overlap with eCommerce functionality but can also be segmented into the website integrations section.

Website integrations

Websites can be very simple extensions of your business or fully integrated, fire-breathing dragons. We find that most websites fit nicely into one of these categories:

• Basic
• Moderate
• Advanced
• Enterprise

Basic integrations may include some third-party form plugin, or simple integration with an email client like MailChimp or Aweber. Moderate integrations may include a variety of forms and conditional logic pulled from CRMs or custom tools. Advanced integrations may include database connectivity or applications. Enterprise integrations encompass a wide range of functionality, often with custom software and advanced applications.