You probably came here in the process of doing research. Are you a small business looking to build a website? Or maybe you’re a non-profit, looking to redesign your website in order to more effectively communicate your mission? Or, are you the marketing director for a multi-million dollar organization looking to improve customer relations and increase revenues?
LemonTreeSites (LTS) has worked with all of the above
Helping to build websites and implementing online marketing plans for organizations of all sizes. We’ve been professionally developing websites for a approximately 8 years and we’d love to educate businesses, consumers and the market at large about what it takes to build a website and, perhaps most importantly determine if you need a website.
Like the businesses they represent, websites are not all created equal. Websites serve various purposes, feature different technology and therefore they can vary greatly in cost as the level of design and functionality increases and becomes more complex to suit your company’s needs. At LTS our hourly rate is $150. We offer special discounts for partner companies, non-profits, and in select cases partner projects. All of our pricing is based on this hourly rate, our overall costs (wages + overhead) and the long-term costs of properly communicating and supporting our clientelle.
This post is also written for web developers
considering branching out on your own. We’ve found that the web community at large REALLY wants to know the going rate for website developments costs. Regardless of who you are, having a baseline to work with is always a good idea. LTS is always up front about pricing and we believe everyone needs to be too (although honestly many in the Internet marketing field are not – charging clients different amount based on their situation and income). Before we get to the pricing, I want to ask you… do you think you need a website?
This is important… and let’s just get this out of the way… you need a website. Period.
Basic Website | Free – $50/month+ and or $1,350 – $5,000
For Small Businesses and Individuals
For 2017, we’re splitting this section out into 2 parts:
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Do it yourself: Free – $50/month
With advances in business models, content management systems, and software there are now (and really there have been) some amazing tools online some include Wix.com, SquareSpace.com among many. These tools are amazing. As a development agency it’s sometimes scary to see how far things have come.
However, it’s important to note – these tools are often complicated and our (general) audience is still not comfortable learning and using these tools. Similar to the above – these sites are highly configurable, but still require some coding, graphic design, and other knowledge to cull out of them a custom, attractive look. However, these are excellent resources and I’d recommend these services for any business looking to do it themselves.
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If you hire a developer: $2,000 – $5,000
A basic designed website, acts primarily as an online brochure, establishing a necessary presence online to answer your customers’ questions “do you exist?”, “are you professional?” and “what do you do?” A basic website can be created in the $2,000 – $5,000 range. This website may or may not allow you to interact in a 2-way conversation with your audience (social networking, blog), transact business directly through your site (ecommerce), or enable you to manipulate and update the pages and content within your site without hiring a web programmer/designer to do it for you (Content Management System does enable this for more $$$).
This gets complicated to further elaborate on why this may or may not be included. For us, the complexities of using and designing around a content management system (or tool that allows you to update your own website) is usually a bit more time consuming then coding HTML from scratch – additionally there are a lot of customer service, content, and small testing requirements that eat up time and budgets for all projects – but which make up a significant fraction of smaller projects.
A basic website site will serve to help brand and market your company, showcase your products and services and inspire sales as a lead generating tool. The design of your website will, most likely, be templated at such low costs. This means that your site probably mirrors that of other sites on the web. With our firm, these sites will be responsive using the latest standards to allow your site to look the same on nearly every computer/device and will be Search Engine Optimized (SEO) for greater natural search engine ranking success.
But not all firms code the same and have search engine optimization or online marketing as a top priority. Also, web analytics are provided with every site we build to track and ensure your web success.
