Cost of Building Website?

We are briefing Marketing agencies next week about activity relating to the launch of our product (CRM system that is SaaS).

Can people please advise what the ball park cost for a website like www.hubspot.com, www.fogbugz.com or http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas?

Essentially we want it to be really smart and fancy and feature around 15-20 pages of content. Within this number I would like a blog and also ability to host a product tour (probably in flash).

Let me know if I need to clarify anything as web design is not something I have much experience in although I do have a clear idea of what I want as an end product.

I don't want to be ripped off by agencies by not doing my homework on pricing!!

cost of building website would depend

if you have no experience, but is computer literate i would say it would take you about 3-4 days to boot up with collecting some general knowledge and have a tool setup

from there and on you should be on your way kicking it

but of course to do so you would need to focus on tool that is easy to understand and is flexible enough without compromising the easiness

in this regard i would warmly recommend joomla which is easy to boot with and is very extensible and you would be able to do most of the things you want easily and w/o much programming knowledge, and is also supported with most hosts, so if you would by any chance not manage to install the lamp (a starters package consisting of various tools required for joomla) locally or don't even want to do so, then you simply would be able to kick it directly from your host in a matter of few clicks

good luck and if you need any assistance don't hesitate to show up at the joomla forum where you will probably find answer to any of your questions, and if not by any chance already not raised you would be able to raise and get it answered in a matter of hours

I know you are looking more in the area of pricing, but this may help you narrow things down:
[webpage design functions][1]

Also, try calling 4 or 5 contractors, telling them what you need and getting a quote. The best way to find competitive prices is to call around as much as possible.

[1]: http://www.internetonlinewebsite.com/ "Webpage design functions"

For a static site and a blog, along with some customization of a premier theme, there's a company I work with that does this for about $500 CDN. This wouldn't include the product tour itself, but it would include embedding a product tour (which you provide) into the site. Also wouldn't include logo design - you would have to provide that.

I am not sure how many functions do you want, how many people will use, what kind of functionality will it have, it is going to be data centric, will it need Admin panel, will it need a constant communication between you and the developers when it is being developed? I would estimate it at USD 40,000 the least providing everything is done from scratch.

Since you have websites as an example your best strategy is to write all the content prior to meeting with a web developer (if you are trying to be as cheap as possible).

• The sites you sent over are probably 30 - 80 hours of work. US companies are usually $80 - $200/hr.

1) Look at www.homestead.com, www.wix.com and www.webnode.com They have templates at a modest prices.

2) You can make minor changes (move a margin) with CSS. Major changes, such as killing an automatic cascading feature, require a pro.

3) You can benchmark website design prices by asking for off-shore quotes, e.g. from www.elance.com

Be aware of the traditional trade-off among "cheap, fast, and good." For a long term, personal E-textbook writing project, I envisioned a 50 "webpage" website with some bells and whistles, but nothing too fancy. I got a quote from a reputable company in India (I checked) for what I wanted for $2,000 -- and it would be done in a week.

However writing the textbook would hardly be done in a week. Therefore I decided on a slow motion "do-it-yourself" approach with webnode. A year later I have a 150 "webpage" website (ca. 500 pages of content) with lots more bells and whistles than originally envisoned. The total cost is still under $200 (10% of the Indian bid) and almost half of it for purchasing images. Granted, I have wasted lots of time, and, very unwillingly, had to learn a little CSS. Nevertheless I am very glad I did not go for "instant website."

Regards,
JH

If it's just a collection of static pages + flash embed of your product + a blog - you should be able to make this on Wordpress for almost nothing. For fancy design - you might get a design firm which varies depending if they are offshore or US/EU based.