Wondering how much you’ll pay for a professionally-designed website in Australia? The short answer? An extremely basic website could cost you as little as $400. A large, complex website with custom functionality could easily cost you between $20,000 and $40,000.
The long answer? It depends! It depends on how many designers and developers you need, your own technical skills, the timeframe for your project, whether you hire a professional web design agency, and a number of other factors.
So to fully explore this subject, Australian Internet Advertising will take you through all of the different things that affect the cost to design and build a website, and discuss why hiring a professional design and development agency is worth the investment.
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Understanding What Goes Into Web Design
Many business owners may not understand what web design agencies do – and what goes into actually building a custom website. Let’s take a look at a brief overview of the process to help you understand why web design can be so expensive.
Ideation & initial designs
First, your web designers and developers will work with you to learn more about your goals and challenges, what you want your website to accomplish, the functionality you need, and other details that will help guide the custom design process.
Then, they will work to create some initial designs, mockups, and wireframes, which will be presented to you for approval. Once you have approved the overall design, work will begin on some initial prototypes.
Prototyping & usability testing
Using specialized software, your designers will bring their initial prototypes to life, creating interactive mockups. The next step is to test these mockups with real users to ensure a good user experience (UX).
Initial website build-out
This includes multiple steps – including coding the website itself, building graphical assets with the help of a graphic designer, hiring content writers to build out the text, and assembling the website.
Depending on your goals, this may even include things like SEO services (search engine optimization) to help maximize your customer conversion rate, or even social media services to rebrand and manage your social media pages, integrate them with your website, and more.
Post-build QA (Quality Assurance)
Once the initial build of your website has been completed, your developers will begin the process of quality assurance (QA), which involves testing every element of the website to ensure it actually works properly, patching security problems (if present), and further usability testing to help refine the user experience of the website.
Website launch, maintenance, and administration
After final testing and review, the website will be launched. If necessary or desired, the developer or development team will also provide further maintenance and administrative services to keep the website running in the future.
This is an extremely simplified overview – but it will help you understand the basics. There’s a lot more involved in building a website than just writing a few lines of code and uploading some images and text. Web design is expensive because it’s complicated – and typically requires multiple developers, designers, and other professionals to collaborate on your project.
What Factors Affect Web Design Pricing?
There are a lot of different things that can affect the cost of your project. Here are just a few of the things you should take into account when planning any website project.
Individual developer vs. professional design agency
Hiring a single freelancer will always be cheaper than hiring a professional design agency, but the project will take much longer.
In addition, it’s likely that your freelancer will be more a “jack of all trades” – they may be able to handle graphic design, front and back-end development, UX/UI design, and other such tasks – but they will not be experts at any of them.
In contrast, hiring a professional design agency is more expensive – but you get the full capabilities of their team, which may lead to a better overall result as well as a faster project completion time.
Timeframe for website launch
The sooner you need a website, the more it will cost. Period. If you need a rush job, you can expect to pay correspondingly higher fees throughout the website development process. In contrast, if you have a longer timeframe and more flexible deadlines, you may find that you’ll pay less throughout the project.
Overall size & complexity of website
If you just want a website built for your restaurant with a homepage, a menu, a “contact us” page, and a link to an online ordering service, this is quite simple – and will likely be relatively inexpensive.
In contrast, if you need to build a complex website for your business with a variety of interactive tools, dozens (or hundreds) of individual web pages, and integrations with third-party software, this will be much more expensive.
Custom feature buildout
This is one of the biggest factors affecting the overall cost of website development. However, custom features can often set your website apart from the competition, so they’re usually worth the investment.
For example, if you run a home renovation company in Australia and want to build a custom quote calculator that allows customers to get a quote for their project online, this will have to be built from the ground-up by your development team – and this could be quite expensive.
However, customers may be impressed by its ease-of-use and unique design – and be more likely to work with your business. By investing in a custom tool or feature, you can boost customer engagement and conversion rates.
How Can I Save Money On My Website? Understanding Your Options
If you can’t spare the money to hire a web development agency or you are interested in other ways of cutting costs, there are a few options you can choose from to save some cash.
Learn the basics of web development yourself
Designing and developing a website on your own is hard work, but it can be done! If you have the time, energy, and desire, you can always begin to learn the basics of web development yourself – and create your own website from the ground-up.
However, this will be impractical if you’re a busy business owner. You’ll need to learn how to code, how to use platforms like WordPress, the basics of SEO and proper information architecture, and many other subjects – it could take months or years. These skills are great to learn, but we don’t recommend it if you already have your hands full just running your business.
Use a website builder
This is a decent option for many small business owners. You can use a website builder and hosting platform like Wix or Squarespace to build a responsive, fast, mobile-friendly website using drag-and-drop tools. Even if you have no experience coding, you can put together a website in just a few days!
The primary issue with this is that you will be quite limited in what you can do. You won’t be able to add custom code or functionality. In addition, these platforms are proprietary – meaning you’re “locked in” to whichever one you choose. It may be hard to migrate to a different platform in the future if you need to.
Hire overseas partners
Hiring developers based in Eastern Europe or South America, for example, can save you money compared to hiring Australian developers. However, you may run into issues with communication, reliability, and project quality – hire overseas at your own risk!
Limit the scope of your website
The simpler your website, the less you’ll pay. You may want to consider limiting the scope of your website to avoid custom integrations and features, and paring down the number of pages offered. However, you need to balance this with proper functionality – a website that’s too simple may not be effective at reaching your customers.
We do understand the desire to save money on a website – it may be tough to stomach spending such a large amount of money. But we would remind you that you get what you pay for when it comes to web development.
If you choose an expert team of Australia-based designers, you’ll definitely get better results than you would if you attempted to build your website yourself – or hired a team of outsourced, overseas workers.
So keep this in mind. Remember that a great website is an investment, and though you may pay a lot up front, you’ll make that money back from your customers.
A website that costs $10K up-front could easily make you hundreds of thousands of dollars over its lifetime. While the ROI (Return On Investment) will vary for each person and business, hiring pros is always worth it.
Need A Professionally-Designed Website? Contact Australian Internet Advertising!
Business owners in Australia who are looking to enhance their online presence can benefit from professional website design services at Australian Internet Advertising. Our experienced web developers have helped small businesses throughout Sydney and Australia enjoy the benefits of a streamlined, modern, and effective website.
With a professional website from Australian Internet Advertising, you’re sure to boost your conversion rate, bring in more customers, and outpace the competition. We offer industry-leading talent at reasonable rates, and specialize in helping small business owners maximize, website visitors, conversions, and revenue.
We can handle any type of website development project – contact us now to schedule an interview for professional design & development of your website, and get a no-commitment quote from our team right away.
