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Your web site will be the first experience many potential customers have with your business, so it's worth spending a little extra money to get the best site you can. Don't let cost be the primary consideration as you compare one provider to another.

Small to mid-sized projects
There are two main types of pricing for web site design work, depending on the size and scope of your project. For small to mid-sized projects, fixed-price package deals are the most common. A five page site with a straightforward design and no 'extras' might cost $300 or $400; a 10 page site with a more customized design and some extras like a search engine or streaming video might be $600 to $800. E-commerce sites are more expensive, starting at around $600 but more commonly going for $1000 or more.

With package pricing, you'll scope out the entire project up front. The price may include a set number of updates, or you may have to pay for that work separately. Package pricing does get you the best overall price for your web site, but it may limit your design options somewhat: often, the vendors that offer these prices work from templates that dictate the general structure of your pages. However, that structure doesn't stop them from creating a customized look that meets your needs.

Larger projects
For larger or more complex projects, you're more likely to pay hourly rates. This is also the case when you work with freelancers. By scoping out the project beforehand, you should be able to get a good idea of how long it'll take and therefore how much it will cost.

Hourly rates make it easier to adjust the project as it goes along. If integration with your customer database is trickier than expected, or if halfway through you realize there are 10 more pages you should add, it doesn't throw the whole project off. Changes like that will impact your budget, but at least the project can proceed.

You can expect to pay anywhere from $30 to $100 per hour for web site design and development work. Basic html coding will fall at the lower end, designers towards the middle, and experienced programmers (for integration or custom database connectivity) are the most expensive.

Of course these rates will vary quite a bit from company to company, as will estimated times. To do a fair comparison, get a detailed proposal/estimate that breaks down how long the vendor expects each step of the process to take: initial design, reviews, coding, testing, implementation. Then you can more easily compare one proposal to the next.

For medium-sized sites – 10 to 30 pages, with some advanced features – you can expect to pay $1,500 to $5,000, depending on the technology extras you need and how many rounds of design revisions you go through. Larger sites with more pages and extensive links to other databases can reach $10,000 or more – the more features and functionality you add that requires custom programming, the more you can expect to spend.

Make sure you budget for extras like hosting, too. Hosting may not cost too much -- $20 to $50 a month for shared hosting at a data center is fairly common – but if your site gets very heavy traffic, you may want to upgrade to a dedicated server, which can run $100 to $200 per month.