What components go into custom website design?
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You tell us, because the number and type of components vary with each site and each business’s unique needs. But there are some essential and popular elements at the core of the design process that are always required:
- Discovery, planning, management, research and consulting – See above.
- Project management – Did we mention that we assign a dedicated brand manager to each client?
- Site navigation design and architecture – So crucial. This sets the pace for your entire brand experience.
- Homepage style and design – This is the most important part of your site and where we focus the bulk of the design time. A typical homepage has many parts, including the header, menus, main display area (usually interactive), secondary content area (also interactive), advertising and widget areas, and footer.
- Subpage styles – This is the main template that drives your customers through your site. At times there are multiple unique sub page styles needed.
- Form style – This is used for all types of data submission, video submission, contacting, blogging, registering and ordering items online.
- Blog style – This is one of the fastest ways to build a web presence, promote news, interact with potential customers and enhance your SEO efforts.
- Landing page style – This is used for lead captures, promotions, specials, events, webinars and more. It allows you to increase the ROI of your advertising campaigns and web traffic measurably, and also to test offers and measure results within a specified environment.
- CMS and development platform – Our CMS allows authorized users to modify text, graphics and subpages easily on the website, without any need for technical HTML knowledge.
What do we charge?
Why beat around the bush? We’ll tell you exactly what it costs. But keep in mind that we hire only the best talent, and we do all our creative work in-house. The cost breaks down into three areas:
- Discovery and consulting – As mentioned above, we recommend budgeting at least 20 hours for meetings, research, planning, site architecture, sales and marketing consulting, site analytics, and ongoing strategic planning. But we realizes for some budgets and businesses that you may only want to use a few hours for initial discovery. Our rate is $175 per hour (minimum three hours) for a team of managers and creative executives. We offer a retainer option for unlimited meetings, consulting, strategic planning and other services for a flat fee of $5,000 a year. (Great deal, you can pick our brain whenever you want, have unlimited meetings, review site performance, etc.!)
- Design and animation – The time we invest here depends on the number of unique styles and animations you desire. Our design fees are typically $3,500-$10,000, depending on your specific requirements. (Simple, micro or sites with a few pages can be less)
- CMS integration and site coding and testing – We charge $2,500 to set up your new designs in either Drupal or WordPress (which is less than many offshore contractors would charge if using our designs). Blog and landing page themes are additional. Subpage/content layout is $225 per page for the first 20 pages and $195 per page thereafter.