There's a disconnect in the web design industry. Customers often don't fully understand what they're paying for and so it can be difficult to quantify why a website costs as much as it does.

It's hard to reason with someone that building an additional page to their website will cost 4 hours of labor when they're under the impression their entire website was built for less money.

A lot of times, I've found these customers aren't aware that their website is a theme that isn't uniquely theirs. They think they've paid $1000 for a custom website and what they have is a theme that someone downloaded off the shelf for $60.

While themes can be valuable and useful as a starting point if they meet the clients budget and expectations, without that transparency the client can end up quite surprised to learn a few small changes will take more effort than what uploading the theme as an entire website and swapping text and imagery did.

On the flip side of alterations potentially costing more than expected, transparency can also open the doors to justifying discrepencies in significantly lower costs. If a website is quoted at costing $500, but all the competitors are quoting $2000, that can seem alarmingly cheap. It could very well be the most fair deal though at an apples to apples comparison level if each company is effectively offering a template.

I mean, at the end of the day why reinvent the wheel of a header, navbar, body and footer when it's been invented over 100,000 times in a #WordPress repository?

Web design is a spectrum of effort and priorities to match a business' budget and needs. How much a website should cost depends on where the website falls on that spectrum and on a more important level is that professed transparently.

It's hard to say exactly what a website of differing types should cost because there's such a push and pull of features. A better method would be to look at the line by line break down and how that corresponds to competing bids.

Is one bid based on a free theme and another based on custom theme development?

If you can't answer that question its impossible to know if your price is fair.

#webdesign