As I look at some great sites around the net, I always wonder what they might cost to build. Could some of you that developed sites post a site along with a price so I could see what really good sites cost?

I will start I spent about $3,500 on...my site www.pilotjourney.com, links database, forums, CMS, artwork, estore (www.pilotjourney.com/shop)

And this site...www.sdfti.com cost $2200.00 ($500.00 was the software that connects the form to a ACT! database though)

What kind of quality and etc, does $5,000 or $10,000 get..or $25,000?

Thanks very much.

Kim
I don't think it is necessary to spend a lot of money to have a good looking site, where you will run up the costs is on the backend and customisation, especially if you have e-shopping or interfaces to other services like WAP, SMS etc.
Up to a few years ago I had responsibility to deliver web sites, though I was not involved at the actually programming level. Typically to get a site up would be in the $250,000 to $500,000 range, but this did include hardware and access not just the sofware, but development and software integration was the bulk of the cost. Whether they look any better than cheaper sites is a matter of opinion, but they do have very complex and feature rich environments.
Support, documentation and testing all consume a lot of resource and in my view these areas are the ones the tend to get ignored or cut back.
But you have a good question and I will be interested to see the responses as I am not sure what customers expect to spend on their websites.

Hi John,

Yes testing and attention to detail I think get left out. The attention to detail and all the little image items that go on the site seem to add a great deal. I see sites that are feature rich meaning they have forums and the like, but the added features are not well integrated at times, they look more out of the box.

The other thing of course is that code does not get commented and written in a fashion that the next person (victim) can figure out what the first person did. And that is hard to sell customers on.

Hi Kim
Its that detail that cost money, a typical IT budget would have 20% hardware, 30% software packages and the other 50% integration, thats not just web stuff either that is in general.
Out of the box is the cheapest of course and I do my fair share of that. But I think to make a site look good you need the artistic input, I know what looks good, but I can't make it

Our average site is $2500 - simple, small business site usually with CMS and MySQL db for news/events.

For excess... hostrocket.com and lunarpages.com paid $50k-$100k for their sites. Unfortunately, my clients don't have as much allotted for their web projects.

I've never really felt that those ceonex designs are all that people make them out to be. Doesn't anyone else think that, at the end of the day, they all look a little too 'samey'? Sure they're pretty, they're functional and professional, but they all have this kind of generic feel to them, which in my book doesn't warrant the excessive pricetags on them.

I would estimate around $2,500 to $5000 for an average site, that's well coded, with some kind of back end functionality for ease of management. Most expensive site I designed a few years back was for around $20,000, and the stupid thing was that after the site was 100% completed, they never even launched the company - but who am I to complain

Jo, I totally agree with the Ceonex sites. You can get the same look at templatemonster.com for much cheaper - if that's what you want.

Personally, I think there is a lack of focus and just too much for people to look at on those types of sites. Yes, they're beautiful, but it doesn't intice me to do business.

But still...hostrocket & lunarpages are doing something right. They've got a lot more customers than I!