Determining Web Site Costs

How much do web developers get paid?

There doesn't seem to be a general answer to that question.

As far as most people know, companies pay a designer a flat fee of a few thousand dollars to put together a basic site, or a decent hourly wage. No custom tailoring to the user, no interactivity, no need for revisions. It doesn't seem like web designing would be an honorable profession, or a viable source of steady income.

The web design market is and has been becoming a very big business. There are plenty of people doing freelance web design for extremely low rates (as low as $15 - $20 per hour), but as they say, you get what you pay for.

It's not unheard of for a company to pay a professional design house $50,000 for a fairly basic web site. Of course, it depends on how good the design firm is.

Basic HTML coders and graphic designers are not in short supply, yet they can still command rates of $75-$125 per hour. Actual programmers - the people that design back-end systems such as dynamic content, databases, automated emails and extranet capabilities (e.g., a "client login" system) - can almost name their price. That's the difference between being a web designer and a web developer/programmer.

Web developing is an area where the creative and technical fields are certainly merging. Web professionals are not only expected to create compelling content, but present it effectively and, in order to add interactivity, do the programming required to customize each user's experience. This is why the design studios for web sites such as eBay and Amazon have teams of in-house developers that each specialize in one part of developing the site. This is also why the large design studios can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for uninteresting sites with incredibly average graphics, if the client does not know any better.

There are occasions where a small group of professionals command all the skills necessary to design, develop, market, and provide a return on investment report for a web site. Here at Resolution Web Design, we pride ourselves on being one of those groups.

We realize that we are not only expected to do our day-to-day jobs, but also continually learn to implement new technologies, as well as new versions of old ones. We are in a state of perpetual education in order to stay ahead of the exponential curve of technology.

It is also our job to educate the client on every aspect of what should be done, and well as why it should be done. Every web site should be different, as the goal of every web site is different. Each site we design is tailored to the maximum benefit of the owner.

For some examples of web sites that have bad design elements, Vincent Flanders' site "Web Pages That Suck" can always provide some food for thought, as well as a laugh.