12 april 2024

A new website, how much does it cost?

It was in the year 2000 that someone asked me this question for the very first time. I was messing around with HTML and CSS at the time and had no idea it would be the kickoff for a career as a website developer.

I have no idea what this website cost, but converted into time it was certainly a meager hourly wage. The layout of the website was based on tables and most of the design involved inline styling. The website lasted a very long time and only went offline about 3 years ago.

In the first years of my "entrepreneurship" I created more of these types of websites. In addition to a full-time job, I gained experience night after night and tried new things over and over again. From plain HTML to websites with databases, and later using content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.

To the question "A new website, how much does it cost?" I replied more and more often: "How much does a car cost?" Because it depends quite a bit on your wishes:

• What is the purpose of the website?
• Do you want a CMS?
• Do we use our own or available styling?
• Do you want functionality that the CMS does not provide?

There are many more questions to consider. Each answer leads to a different estimate of time, and therefore money.

I took my first steps as a professional website developer through one of the country's largest staffing agencies. I did CMS implementations for various companies and governments and after that employment I did the same as a self-employed person for, among others, the UWV, the National Archives and the Erasmus University (just a bit of name-dropping). Then a website no longer costs a few hundred or a few thousand euros, but it costs hundreds of thousands and millions.

But whatever the budget, many activities remained the same. Time and again we started with nothing and then set up a server, installed a CMS, defined and configured different types of content types, organized security, kept an eye on SEO and accessibility, performed updates, and so on, and so on, and so on. ..

About 2.5 years ago we decided with TwelveBricks that things could be done differently. By extensively automating the most common activities, we can offer the same professional website costing tens or hundreds of thousands of euros for just the costs of hosting and maintenance of that website. And let's be honest, those costs are always there anyway, regardless of where and how the website is built.

If you now ask me "A new website, how much does it cost?", the answer is "100 or 200 euros per month.".

I wonder what my answer will be in 10 years...