We mostly do completely custom work– we don’t have many canned packages that are just ready-to-go flat-rate kinds of things– so we meet with you and determine your needs and then design something that’s completely custom for you. From there, we try to utilize as many of the opensource tools we’ve compiled and/or developed, in order to keep the cost down, but we also modify those tools for each and every site in order to best suit the customer’s needs.
So we bill by the hour, and you get an estimate up front letting you know what you can expect. If your site is easier to build than we expected in the estimate, then you pay less (this happens a lot).
We split our bids into a couple of parts: one for the Design portion and one for the Production portion. The design portion is where we’re showing you custom-designed mockups of the site’s potential look-and-feel. Production is where we actually do the building and coding. To give you a ballpark idea of cost: When we custom-design a site for a client (as in no pre-made templates, but a custom look-and-feel tailored to your needs), the design portion of the project generally takes between 20-24 hours. That’s around $2000, and usually includes a couple of different concepts for home and inner pages, with a few revision rounds to the chosen ones. The Production portion of a project varies greatly with the complexity of the project. A simple 5 page informational site built off of one of our custom designs, with a Content Management System, will usually call for roughly 20-30 hours of production, training and testing time, bringing you in with around a $4000 price tag. Custom-designed Magento or osCommerce sites usually require much more production time, but rarely exceed $10,000 to build (including design), with most coming closer to $8000.
For those looking to save money, we offer some “no-design” options for those with WordPress or Drupal-backed informational sites. This package lets the client pick from a set of pre-made templates for their informational website, blog and Content Management System. This comes close to eliminating that 20 hour design charge, and dramatically lowers the price for most simple, informational sites. Then again, 95% of our clients hire us because they want us to design something unique for them… but the “no-design” option is available for those on a tight budget.
Regardless of the kind of site you have, you will receive a written estimate beforehand. The estimate will outline the site’s proposed features and costs, so there are no surprises later on.
iluminada design: