It is all about Price & Performance

"Cheap solutions are often unexpectedly expensive"

CIT is a services company; we sell our time and expertise.  We deliver websites, video and standard business application software.

Can you do any or all of these things yourself?  Probably.  Can you do them as well as we can?
Probably not.

Can you do any or all of these things yourself as well as we can without spending excessive time and neglecting your core business?
If you can then you are in the wrong business.

CIT vs. the Competition

CIT is not the cheapest website design or software design company; the cheapest are generally based in India and Pakistan.  Since you as a customer have no way of knowing what else an Asian-designed cheap website or software is doing (like infecting your customers' computers and collecting credit card numbers), you might not want to consider that option.  Don't trust people if they know that neither you nor the police know where they live - just saying...

All things considered, we try to work in the $25-$55 an hour range.  Sometimes we bid a fixed cost website and underestimate how long it will take; that is our problem, we do not believe in surprises on an invoice.  Sometimes we overestimate; that is your good fortune because you will either get more than you expected or a get a discount.

For general reference, here is a link to the Town of Preston CT's website that cost $12,000.  Sorry if it loads slowly, minor design flaw...  We know the price because the customer (the City) bragged on the internet about the price in a Google Alert.  Overall this is a very nice website and it is huge.  It probably took the designer 250 hours and $50 an hour for this quality is reasonable.  But if we were to submit a binding bid to create something like this, our bid would be under $6,000 because we would expect that we can do something like this for about 160 hours, not 250.

Billable hourly rates for .NET and WPF development with MS SQL Server are in the $55 range.  A rule of thumb in the software industry is that a very good programmer is several times as productive as an average programmer.  Believe it, it is true.  CIT has a very good programmer/owner who is quite content to earn $55 an hour. Which means to compete with us, most of our competition will be working for under $20 an hour.  Would you trust a professional willing to work for less than $20 an hour with anything important?

How much should a website cost?

I wish I could answer that for you.  It depends on how much you want and how much you give me.

If you are willing to write the text that goes onto each page and you already have good pictures or are willing to spend hours looking through stock pictures on fotilia, then I can probably design your home page in a day and each page thereafter in 4 hours.  So a minimal 3-page website will take me 16 hours; 16 hours * $30/hour = $480.

On the other hand, if you expect me to pick out the pictures and then you don't like what I choose and I have to buy 15 pictures to find the 3 you like, it is going to take me longer.  If you want me to write a description of what your business does and why customers should buy from you, and then we go to 5 revisions before you like the finished text, then that home page is likely to take 20 hours and each page thereafter 10 hours.  A 5 page website like this will take me 60 hours so the price should be 60 * $40/hour or $2400.

Please remember that you only see half the work that goes into a website page.  It makes a difference to Google's ability to find your website in how I format your website, how I name objects on it, and how I promote your website.  The text we write makes a huge difference, just changing a few words can be the difference between 2 customers for you each month and 20 a day.

The bottom line: how much a website actually costs

You should expect to bay about $500 for a minimal website, $1,000 for a typical website and $5,000 for a big one.  If you want a logo designed, Adobe Flash or a database behind the website (eCommerce websites almost always have a database), expect to pay more.  I hope this helps.  I hope I can save you some money and time on your website, but more importantly I expect to deliver an effective website - one that is worth more than you invested in it.