I’ll be graduating at the end of this year, from my web design and web development courses. Is it still a good time to start a web design business? And is it realistic to aim to earn £100K per year from web design and web development?

How Much to Pay For a Web Designer?

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Claudia_Schulze]Claudia Schulze

In our ‘Website Basics Explained ‘ series we will show you where to start to get your first website, and what you need to go online.

The prices web designers put on their services vary drastically. Like most purchases, with web design, you tend to get what you pay for. If your project is fairly small and straightforward, freelancers may charge less than big agencies. By ’small’ we mean a regular website with about five pages like ‘Home’, ‘Services’, ‘References’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’.
Of course the sky is the limit when it comes to individual services, and there are also certainly regional differences, but here are some rules of thumb.

How Much Does A Website Cost?
The one-time set-up fee for a ‘basic’ individual website with up to five pages done by a Web Design Freelancer or a professional Web Designer ranges between $350 and $1,000, depending from where you are located, and how much ‘individuality’ your website requires, and what material you can provide.

Do you have logo, photos and text for your website, or does your web designer need to invest his time to creating the content too? Graphic design work and copy writing takes a lot of time, and you need to find an agreement with your web designer, how many drafts are included until you finally approve the end result. Don’t get fooled by ‘paying by the page’, because once your main layout is set up, it takes only a fraction of the time to add another page. If you get a cheap quote it is likely that the web designer will use a out-of-the-box template, and your website might not look as individual as you wish! Of course, the sky is the limit when it comes to web design. For highly individual professional websites you should get a detailed quote from different web design companies and compare before you sign a contract.

How Much Does A Shopping Cart Website Cost?
The creation of a shopping cart website is usually a very individual task. If you have a small business with only a couple hundred products, you should be able to find a web designer who can use standard e-commerce software which is available for under $300 (your web designer might even be able to use a web host that offers free shopping cart scripts). The more requirements you have the more costly it will be, but there are a couple of free or cheap scripts out which a good website designer can use and adapt to your needs. The total cost of a small shopping cart website one-time set-up fee should not be more than $1,000 to $1,500. All professional shopping cart scripts include an online ‘back office’ where you could even update your inventory in the future fairly easily yourself.

If you have a couple thousand items to sell and need a real professional shopping cart website, you will have to get an individual quote from different web design companies to compare. Make sure you talk about the support and maintenance costs too!

If you need just one simple page to capture email addresses, you can even try to get a freelancer to adapt a free available website template for you. His one-time set-up fee should not be more than $300. But with such a website it is crucial that you get a person who knows how to optimize your website in regards to the keywords your customers will search for. You might even think of buying an existing website. Here is having a website only as good as continuous efforts to market your website in order to generate the traffic you are looking for. This can be very time and/or money intensive depending from your product. Time means somebody has to constantly promote your website by e.g. submitting articles to blogs and ezines, money means you can instead invest in Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing to get your website instantly ranking on top of the search engines result pages.

We hope these basic numbers will give you an idea what you have to budget to get your own website.

If you want to know more about web design and how you can get your website on the front page of Yahoo and Google, please visit our website San Diego Web Designer.

If you are interested in learning how to make your own website, please read the free setp-by-step guide Make Your Own Website.

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?How-Much-to-Pay-For-a-Web-Designer?&id=2392122] How Much to Pay For a Web Designer?