Cost of 10 Page Small Business Website

I believe, Warrior for hire section of this forum is the most appropriate section for him Warriors For Hire

I've done a lot of these and since I am slowing fading out of that business I don't mind sharing what I have learned.

I am located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and a lot of my clients are local. Therefore, these prices should be middle to top end of the scale for small to medium sized businesses.

Taking into account all the expenses you are going to need to be billing at $125-$150 an hour minimum.

A good web developer ~$40/h
A good graphics designer ~$40/h

So right off the bat you would be looking at between $70 and $90 per hour just for staff (this is high end). Now you can find a web developer with design experience and probably get by and to be honest you wouldn't pay them more than $50/h. Keep in mind they are doing two jobs so won't be as efficient but I only hired these employees so I will use them in my example.

Factor is cost for a theme (I assume you will get an out of box solution to work from) and there is $75 for a good responsive theme.

If you truly are going to brand the theme, set it up etc you are probably looking at 8 hours work combined, lets say 10 for easy math.

Right of the gate your expenses for staff and materials is ~$575.00 for a basic branded WordPress theme.

Now you need content which was always a pain for me because companies expect content to write itself. I charge $25 a page and outsource on O-Desk for $12.5 an article. 10 pages = ~$125

Running total = ~$700.00

Every website requires revisions and small additions. Adding Goggle analytics, formatting, making the site live, setting up hosting etc. We will bundle this in to 4 hours work (based on experience). At our $40/h rate that's $160.

Running total = ~$860.00 or ~14 billable hours + content

These are just your expenses. Now your other overhead of office space, marketing/sales, support etc. These fluctuate a ton case by case. I always found 2 websites per week, per developer was very easy to complete (I always planned for worst case).

So that's 104 websites per year, lets say 100. If your office space is $2000 a month (nice multi-roomed office) all expenses included. $2000x12 = $24 000 / 100 websites = $240 per site.

Now our site costs ~$1000 in expenses..

Now you just need to your cost of acquisition per site and then what margin you want to make.

Bottom line, a basic 10 page site was typically quoted between $1500-$2000 + HTS (our 13% tax) for our clients. We found this to be top end of the price but we delivered quality.

So if you just go off of the 14 hours it takes to build. 14 x 125 = $1750 or @ $150/h $2100 before tax.

You can obviously cut costs as you become more efficient and if you offer other services like hosting. Now you have more revenue coming in and your cost of overhead isn't just covered by websites.

Bottom line - I would say cheapest I would charge for a 10 page site with an established company is $1500 and top end $2000.

Hopefully that helps.

Robb

Aim for a higher quality market.

You're always going to find someone who wants to pay peanuts for quality work, but conversely there are people out there willing to pay well for the same quality work. It just takes more effort on your part to search them out.

And you'd end up with a very unhappy customer.

The question here refers to a small business website. That approach might be fine for a thin affiliate site, but a small business selling products and services is going to require high quality copy that converts visitors to leads. A $12.50 article written by a writer that doesn't know the business isn't going to cut it.