A good web designer costs around $200 an hour these days. At that rate, a small business website cost adds up fast. For a lot of businesses it’s money well spent. For a lot of others, it’s the reason the website still has 2018 in the footer.
This is the first post in Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
Small business website cost at $200 an hour
A designer at that rate is good at things most people never notice. They’ll spend an afternoon on the space between a heading and the paragraph under it. They’ll try six versions of a button before they’re happy with one.
That care is real, and it shows. It also adds up. At $200 an hour, a round of revisions that takes a day is $1,600. Most redesigns go through several rounds before anyone signs off.
Who should pay it
Some businesses should. If your brand is the product, like a clothing label or a restaurant group opening its fifth location, the look of the site is doing real selling and the small details matter.
If your site has to do something unusual, like a custom booking system or a members’ area, you need people who build that kind of software for a living. We happen to be some of them, and there’s more on that below.
And if five people at your company have to approve every change, you’ll pay for the meetings either way. Agencies are set up for that.
Who probably shouldn’t
Most small businesses need a website that does a handful of things well. Visitors should learn what you do, where you are, and when you’re open. Calling, booking, or buying should be easy. The site should look current enough that nobody wonders whether you’re still in business, and it has to work on a phone and for someone using a screen reader.
That’s a real list, and doing it well takes real skill. It doesn’t take forty hours of moving things a few pixels at a time.
What changed
We used to turn down website work because the math didn’t work for small clients. The building took too long, and the back and forth took longer.
Now we design and build websites with AI doing most of the typing, while we decide what goes where and why. A new version of a page takes minutes to make, so trying five versions costs about what one used to. You end up with a site that looks and works like the ones larger companies pay agencies for, at a fraction of what they pay.
Which one are you?
A few questions to ask yourself:
- Is the look of your website itself a reason people buy from you?
- Does your site need logins, payments, or anything custom?
- Do more than two people have to approve every change?
If you answered no to all of them, you’re probably paying for hours you don’t need. Some people in that spot build their own site with ChatGPT. A website built with AI will cover what your business needs.
If you said yes to the second one, the website is the easy part. Logins, payments, bookings and anything that stores customer data need real engineering behind them, because a mistake there leaks data or loses money. That’s the other half of what we do. We build custom software for small businesses too, so the site and the system behind it can come from the same people.
If you’re somewhere in between, a short consult will sort it out before you spend anything on a build.
Over the next few posts we’ll get into where the time on a website redesign really goes, what happens when revisions stop costing anything, and what the AI does and what we do.