Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Just kidding.  Web design, web development and web maintenance go hand in  hand.  What ever company or person you chose (pick me! pick me!) to manage your web presence should be upfront with what these terms are and how much its going to cost you.  So we’re going to break it down piece by piece for you and lay out an average cost with expectations.

Web Design

Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software.  Just like an artist many different tools exist to complete this part and costs vary from free to thousands of dollars.  Small business types may want to budget around $300 on the low end to $800 or more on the high end.  The final cost is dependent on amounts of revisions you want and how custom you need things.  If you already have a logo, a color scheme in mind and don’t need too many custom bells and whistles you can aim for the low end.

Now that you have your web presence.  Wait.  Why do I keep saying web presence?  Well, a web page is a web page but you can call it different things.  Here is a quick list and definitions:

• Web pages.  This is a few pages that have a similar design with information presented on different pages, changes occur infrequently.  You can think of this as an online business card or flier.
• Blogs. A blog is almost exactly like a web page except information is added frequently.  See my web presence for an example.  I have static pages and pages that get updated more often.  Yes the best of both worlds.
• Web presence. I use this term to cover all the places your brand may be viewed on.
• CMS.  Content management systems sound very complex but are quite the opposite.  This site is built with one very popular and flexible CMS called WordPress.  Another example of a CMS is your Yahoo mailbox, so if you can manage your email some how you can manage a CMS for your web presence.

Web Maintenance

Your web presence is designed now the whole world can find you, right?  Wrong.  All the cool stuff you have designed needs to be stored on the internet and it needs an address.   The files made need to be stored or hosted on the web.  That is why its called web hosting.  Those pretty little files you made can be hosted anywhere in the world across multiple servers all you need is an address to find them.  The address or URL can be almost anything, its yourname.com.

So how much does the URL or domain name cost along with the web hosting.  9 time out of 10 you get the domain name with your web hosting and expect to pay from about $130 to $200 a year for both.  The more successful your presence is the more its going to cost you.  By success I mean thousands and thousands of pages views per month.  I like to start you off on the low end and add more if you need it.

As you can see the internet can be an affordable way to advertise or connect with people all over the world or as close to you as your own town.  Just make sure you know what you are buying before you lay down the cash!  Contact me for a quote or questions.

David