This should be a simple question but unfortunately there isn't an answer to this question. When someone asks us this question we try to associate a process that they may be familiar with in order to understand where we're coming from. We tell the the person that it's similar to asking a builder, "how much does a house cost."

Just like the builder needs to know a lot of information about you and your family (how many kids do you have, what ages are your kids, do you want tile floors, walk-out basement, etc.). You can build a house for $10,000 in Africa or millions of dollars on the shores of the French Riviera.

Web sites are the same. You can build a very simple 5 page Web site using a Web site template for $1,000 using a college student jack-of-all-trades. You can also build a behaviorally driven 1000 page Web site, with a specific photo and video shoot with a World-Wide Agency for $10,000,000.

Our answer to the question of "How much does a Web cost?" is it depends on how important your Web site is to the overall sales of your business. If your overall sales is $20,000,000 and only 10% of your sales come from your Web site you shouldn't spend $1,000,000. One thing to keep in mind, the days of redesigning your Web site once every two years are gone. Your prospects and customers expect to see your online branding change frequently. That doesn't mean you change your logo but you want your prospects and customers to visually see on your Web site that things are on the move. For that reason you should at least budget the same amount for annual updates as you do to rebuild your Web site.

Another thing we believe in, in part due to the previous statement, is that you shouldn't try to implement the Holly Grail of Web sites all at once. We always push back on our clients if the functionality they want to add is going to take more than 5 months to launch. We push back by prioritizing the functionality and implementing the majority in the first phase and the rest in the second phase. This shows your visitor that new things are being added as well as it gets something up quicker. We've found that if the project takes too long that things change and end up driving up the cost of implementation because new items are added, old items are no longer needed, etc.

So how much does it cost to build a Web site? It depends. It depends on your budget and the importance the Web site has on the overall business. We help our clients understand how to take their budget and put it towards ideas on the Web site that will increase sales for the business.

If you have any questions give us a call or go to our Web site at http://www.ontargetinteractive.com