Costs of websites

What does a website cost?

The production of a notorious website in Austria for the self-presentation of a person was supported years ago with € 283,000. The comparatively measly result is no longer online due to the owner's professional reorientation. However, far better websites can also be produced at much lower cost.

How much can a website really cost in reality?

In general, the costs of a website are made up of these items:

One-off costs

• Concept
• Layout (graphic work)
• Texting
• Programming (HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP/...)
• Optional: Setting up the content management system / CMS (incl. training)
• Set up hosting product (publish on the rented web space)

Ongoing costs

• Domain
• Hosting

In addition, there would be any maintenance costs, be they editorial or technical maintenance costs (especially for CMS).

The figures

What are the usual cost blocks? The services

• Concept
• Layout
• Texting
• Programming

are often provided by service providers or they collaborate on them. Here it depends on the scope of the planned website at launch and which of this work is outsourced.

The concept is usually developed in workshops together with the website owner. Depending on the size of the organization or website, one to four half-day workshops are required. A half-day workshop usually costs around € 400 to € 600.

Layout work costs from € 700 (if an individual contractor is commissioned, agency work usually costs at least twice as much), the costs for texting are calculated by the hour or number of characters, and the programming (implementation of the layout in HTML/CSS, form programming, etc.) depends very much on the functionality of the website. For small and simple websites, costs usually start at € 1,000.

The other cost estimates

• Set up hosting product: 10,- to 50,- one-off (these costs are often waived)
• Domain: 10,- to 100,- per year (these costs are often waived in the first year of hosting)
• Hosting: 5,- to 50,- per month

If the website is to be published on the basis of a CMS (Content Management System), the implementation and configuration costs for the CMS will also be incurred. How high these are depends on

• the requirements of the CMS (multilingualism, forms, slideshows, etc.)
• the complexity of the CMS itself.

A website based on WordPress, for example, can take just a few hours, perhaps days, to create, whereas with Typo3 or Drupal it's usually a different story. Here, the time and effort required must be estimated in weeks or even months. The reward, however, is something that is almost infinitely expandable.

So you can see that a professional website can be quite financially demanding at first. However, with a clever choice of tools and hosting offers and some time invested, the overall costs of a website can be significantly reduced.