A website design quote can run to a few pages of line items, and most people only read the total. The lines are where you find out what you’re paying for, and which parts are fair to question.
Part of Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
What’s in a typical website design quote
Most quotes break down into something like this:
- Discovery: meetings and research before anything gets designed
- Design: mockups of the main pages, plus rounds of revisions
- Build: turning the design into working pages
- Content: writing, photos, and moving text over from the old site
- Project management: the time spent coordinating all of it
- Launch and hosting: getting it live, and keeping it there
Behind every line is a number of hours times a rate. Ask for the hours, because hours are what you can compare between quotes. If the rate is around $200 an hour, it’s also fair to ask whether you need that kind of designer at all.
Lines that have gotten cheaper
Build and revisions are where AI has changed the math the most. A page that used to take a developer a day can often take an hour or two. A round of revisions can now happen the same day, where it once meant a week of back and forth.
Design has gotten cheaper too, in a quieter way. When a new version costs minutes, you can look at several instead of arguing over one. If a quote has big numbers on these lines, ask how the work will be done.
Lines that haven’t moved
Your content still has to come from somewhere. Nobody knows your business better than you, and good photos of your place and your people still take a camera and an afternoon.
Decisions take as long as they take. If five people need to approve the home page, that’s five calendars, and no tool speeds that up.
Hosting, your domain, and any paid add-ons (plugins) or licenses are ongoing costs. They’re usually small, but they never go away, and you should know who’s paying them.
Custom features are their own line. Things like online booking or payments are software, and they’re priced differently from design work. We build that kind of custom software too, and we’re happy to tell you whether a number looks right.
Questions to ask before you sign
- How many hours is each line, and at what rate?
- How many rounds of revisions are included, and what does an extra round cost?
- Who owns the domain and the hosting account? You should. ICANN Lookup will show who holds your domain now.
- Can we edit the site ourselves after launch, and what does it cost if we can’t?
- What happens to the site if we stop working together?
The last one tells you the most. A good answer is that you keep everything and can take it anywhere. If the answer is vague, ask for it in writing before you sign.