All websites fall into two categories:

1.) they offer content

2.) they offer a service

Examples: A blog about computers offers content. A site that lets you put dates into a calendar is offering a service. Many of Google’s websites offer a service: email at Gmail and spreadsheets at Google Docs. If you have an already existing company and you’d like to put up a few pages describing (or selling) your products/services, then you are envisioning a content site. If you’d like to do a magazine style site, then you are still considering a content site.

Price Ranges

Different kinds of projects have different price ranges. We can only offer very rough guidelines as to the kinds of prices we’ve seen for previous projects. Talk to us about the specifics of the project you are thinking of and we could probably offer you a better idea of how much you need to be prepared to spend.

• A personal or company blog, set up using a free service: $0 (or whatever value you place on one hour of effort). But to keep this going and acquire traffic will probably cost thousands of dollars, at least in terms of your time.
• A small company site that has 5 to 10 pages describing the products/services offered by the company. $1,000 to $5,000 depending on how prepared you are, and also on how clear in your own head you are about what you want. Disorganization and changing your mind are both expensive.
• A company site describing the products/services offered by the company, and operated by software that allows the staff at the company to continually update the content on the site: $4,000 to $20,000.
• A company site that both describes products/services and also offers some kind of software service. For instance, a real estate firm might allow users to look up listings based on zip code or a manufacturer of skateboards might allow users to design their own skateboard, mixing and matching those variables that can be customized. $10,000 to $40,000 depending on the complexity of the software to be developed.
• An online store that sells digital downloads of songs or videos: $25,000 to $100,000 depending on the variety of prices/royalties you want to support with your suppliers and how much marketing you want to do. If you want original technology for handling the songs or videos, you might easily burn through another $50,000 on computer programming.
• A company wiki so the staff can document a particular kind of information – perhaps support information for your customers, or technical info for use by your sales people, or a human resources directory aimed at answering common staff questions. This should be on the low end of $2,000 to $30,000. The biggest variable is whether you need some special, custom feature. If you can use unmodified, off-the-shelf software, you can keep things quite inexpensive. But as soon as you get into custom programming, the cost will sky-rocket.
• An online magazine/blog meant to dominate a particular niche: $25,000 to $100,000. For instance, you might want to cover fishing in Alaska. You’ll probably want to establish commercial relationships with 6 or 7 avid fishermen who are also known to be good writers. They might each post something once a week. You might spend $50 or $100 a week on each of them, depending how much news they can commit to delivering. You should also hire a lawyer to create an agreement you want the writers to sign.
• An online social network for some demographic niche, for instance, new moms, or hockey fans: $20,000 to $500,000. You can keep costs low by using off-the-shelf software, but you will probably want to customize the look and feel of the site, for the purpose of branding. The more services you offer (upload photos? upload videos? search for other users in the same geographic area?) the more expensive the programming will be. If your target demographic niche is risky (perhaps you want to run a site that offers services to recovering drug addicts) then you’ll want to hire a lawyer to write an air-tight Terms Of Use agreement. Lawyers are expensive, so this will drive up your start-up costs. Also, you’ll need a budget for marketing or you’ll never acquire any traffic.
• A completely original idea for a software service that no one has ever thought of: price unknown. There is a rule in software design that the more original the idea, the harder it will be to accurately estimate the cost of the project.

What drives software development costs?

If you are considering a software site, be aware of what drives the costs of software development.

• The more customization you need, the more expensive things become
• The bigger the project, the more customization you’ll need
• When programmers invent things from scratch, the number of bugs increase, and the amount of time that will have to be spent beta-testing
• If you want original technology, then your programmers will need to invent things from scratch
• To control risk, all programmers must live by the “Hit By A Bus” rule, which is, if they are hit by a bus and killed, with a project only half-done, another programmer should be able to easily take their place
• The more original the technology, the harder it will be for other programmers to understand the code (creating possible violations of the “Hit By A Bus” rule)
• Cost, risk, complexity and understandability (of the code) can be controlled by the use of a software “framework”. Some of the popular frameworks for web development include Ruby On Rails and Symfony (written in PHP).

MoonViper Web Services works hard to keep costs down.

Whenever possible, we attempt to “recycle” code from other projects to keep our client’s costs as low as possible.  Please note that every project, just like every client, is unique.  We work hard to provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed.

Contact us today to learn how MoonViper Web Services can provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed on the constantly expanding internet.

Adapted from: http://www.teamlalala.com/