We live in the digital era, so having an online presence – that is, a website – is critical for your company’s success. Even if you opt for a low-end hosted solution like WordPress.com, you’ll have to customize you website (and pay for extra storage!) once your business grows. How much does it cost to make a fully functional website early on?
Top 3 factors affecting the cost of developing a website
Functionality and developer hourly rates There are different types of websites, of course. If you need a simple online business card, customized blog or photo storage solution, you can address a reliable PHP development company and have a WordPress.org website set up and running in 20-35 man-hours. It takes a little longer (up to 45 man-hours) to build a corporate or e-commerce WP site. With over 42 thousand paid and free WordPress plugins and design themes, there’s no need to do lots of recoding; your vendor’s major task is to avoid plugin conflict and ensure smooth website performance. WP is a win-win solution for entrepreneurs and startups that want to build a business site, a small online store or web community (including photo sharing platforms and sites that allow third-party authors to publish their content). Things get a little more complicated once you decide to write a custom extension or create your own design theme. It takes at least 32 hours to design a minimalistic website interface with usability in mind. Designers’ hourly rates range from $ 148 in the USA to $ 30-40 in Eastern Europe. Also, there’s a direct correlation between the number of plugins you want to enable and the dev costs. The US PHP developer hourly rates are $ 95-148; software development companies from Latin America and Eastern Europe charge $ 35-50 and $ 25-35 per man hour, respectively.
Tech stack and growth strategy
Self-hosted WordPress, Joomla and Drupal sites are inexpensive and easy to put up; why do website development costs sometimes reach $ 18 million (the US government has reportedly spent that much on a website that tracks government spending)? Complex websites that process and store secure data and require integration with numerous third-party extensions and services (including payment and delivery systems, enterprise software and business process automation solutions) often use other content management systems and are not written in PHP. Even popular content management systems like Drupal and Joomla offer a limited number of ready-to-use plugins and design themes (over 8 and 16 thousand, respectively). And these tools are not always suitable for large scale websites. Let’s take e-commerce, for example. If you want to create an online catalog that would list up to 50 thousand items, automate product delivery and use marketing plugins to provide a better insight into customer behavior, you need Magento – the open-source e-commerce platform that is used by 30% of all online stores out there. But there’s a catch. Despite its out-of-the-box nature, 3+ thousand plugins and large talent pool, Magento has a very complex architecture. Even developers who offer PHP web apps development services need at least a couple of months to master the technology. And what if you consider pulling an Amazon? With over 240 million active customers and 480 million products sold in the USA alone, the popular e-commerce platform uses several programming languages including Java, C++, Python and Scala. Pretty much like other stores with huge server demands, Amazon abandoned their monolith architecture and switched[1] to microservices. The development and maintenance of a large microservices ecosystem requires a lot of time and is handled by a large team composed of software architects, developers, QA engineers, business analysts and project managers, so don’t expect charity.
Content
Software development companies sometimes offer content writing and SEO services to their customers. High-quality content (including articles, infographics and videos) helps businesses educate their target audience and raise awareness. It’s no wonder 88% of companies around the globe use some form of content marketing! Experienced copywriters’ rates range from $ 500 (USA) to $ 40 (Eastern Europe including the Baltic region) for a 4-page SEO-optimized article. If you want to save on content and search engine optimization, you may ask your vendor to install SEO plugins and spend hours writing landing page copies yourself (the approach surely work with WordPress). A year ago Clutch.co interviewed[2] over 350 small business owners and found out 46% of the respondents did not have a website. What’s more, 12% of those were unlikely to build one in the near future. And that’s a perfect recipe for disaster. By 2018, 30% of Fortune 500 companies will be outpaced by their rivals who invest in the Internet of Things, AI and the emerging web development solutions. Even tycoons struggle to meet customers’ expectations; what about your business? Although responsive design has driven high-end website development prices up by 20%, the average cost of building a website has shrunk over the years and is now estimated at $ 3-5 thousand (we’re not talking about the next Netflix, of course). The game is worth the candle, right?
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