When deciding placing your business online and creating an webpage as showcase for your business you must be aware of all costs so you can easily create a initial budget to develop the website and a budget to maintain it.
There are several ways to calculate the cost of a website development, but in the overall the most efficient is by monetizing the development time.
The concept is simple, you will pay the time necessary for the developer, or company developing, to create your website. Needs will be analyzed a project will be made and the development time will be set for that project to be done.
There are 2 paths when deciding the project and you as the responsible for budgeting the website value should be aware of this. The first path is by creating it custom. As the word says, custom, the website will be fully created to fulfill your corporation needs. It take more time to develop, but it will surely be much more efficient to your corporation than a “shelf-system”. The second path is by customizing a shelf-system product. In this case instead of reinventing the wheel a shelf-system would be used to support the main functionality of the website and a design, a face, would be applied over it.
No need to mention that usually the customized shelf-system are less expensive than a custom system, therefore the decision should always be made over the long run of the website. Just make this question: Will this be able to hold this functionality in the future? If the answer is no for a shelf-system, then you should consider the custom build.
Monetizing the choices above presented for a fictional e-commerce site would be:
- shelf-system: 16 hours to install, configure and design a new face for it.
- [Note]: Some shelf-systems for e-commerce have maintenance and license pricing.
- custom build system: about 200 hours to fully develop, test and design a face for it.
Besides the development of the website you must consider adding the domain registration and a server to host the application. Registration is very inexpensive and some servers even give it for free, but a server can go from $6.99 a month (like Hostmonster.com) to a couple hundred when dealing with a private server.
This value will be always renewed annually and it, if the system is well done, should be the only value paid for maintenance until it’s necessary to improve the website design and functionality.
In general, what you pay is what you get, so make sure that the project being presented to you is a project that will fulfill your needs and if you need some help, contact-us, that we will be glad to help.