By Kara Jensen

As the principal of a web design agency that focuses on small business, I receive numerous calls with the immediate question, "How much is a website?" This is like asking the question, "How much does a house cost?" You can’t answer a question like that without more information and discussion.

To determine a price for house, you’d need to know what the client’s looking for: the desired number of bedrooms and baths, location and square footage. Once those key questions are addressed, a price range can be determined.

It’s the same with a website. Many people think I can answer the website cost question immediately, but unfortunately I can’t. Two major issues come up when discussing website cost: marketing objectives and functionality.

Marketing Objective
What’s the purpose of the website? The answer can’t be, "I need one because every other business has one." Here are some questions to address:

• Who’s your ideal customer? How’s the website going to communicate to your customer segments?

• What’s your unique value proposition? Within 3-5 seconds, website visitors need to know what you do and what makes you different.

• Do you want your website to be a lead generator, an online store or just a credibility piece? Many businesses don’t want "the masses"  
  to find them online because they target a very specific client.

• What’s the call to action? What do you want visitors to do once they get to your website? Are they making a purchase, downloading a
   whitepaper, contributing content?

Functionality
Once there’s consensus on the marketing objective, you can start determining the website tools needed to help reach your objective. These questions include:

• What do you want your website to do?

• What tools will your ideal customer value?

• How do you want to engage and inform your audience?

• Do you want your website to have a "clients only" portal?

• Who’ll be managing the content?

When engaging the services of web design agency, the marketing objective should always be discussed first. This will establish the foundation for the tools/functionality needed to meet the overall website objective. Normally, with the information gathered from a single exploratory discussion, a cost estimate can be determined.