How much for a web design

How much for web design? Is the single most frequently asked question, asked to most web designers? It’s also the least properly answered question. Most designers will dodge this question with “It depends”.  You often need to push hard to get the actual figure.

Unlike the cost for hosting and domain registration (which are considerably cheap and constant), the value of a website is based upon many factors, most of which may be unknown by the time the question is asked. So “It depends”.

Number of pages

The saddest thing is most people automatically assume it depends on the number of pages. They go a step further and volunteer that, “it’s only 5-8 pages”. For me it really doesn't depend on the number of pages because most website designs use the same layout on most of the pages. I almost always design 2 pages. The home page, and the “other pages”. If every page was much different from the next, the cost could depend on the number of pages. 
Further, these days, with web 2.0+, the content is stored in a database, not as pages. And a bit of programming technically makes your website a 1 page website, that displays different content based on the queries sent to the database. I will leave this ‘complicated’ argument there for now.

Complexity

The features and “effects” on your website has some impact on the cost but not as much as most people think, Though some of these bells and whistles are free online. Sometimes it takes some amount of effort to combine these utilities to work as you want them. For example gianttentacles.com is a Joomla content management system, so the blog, search, back end and many other features came for free to me, so I don’t directly charge for them but for bending it to fit your needs.

Theme and layout

This is a major determining factor of the cost of your web design. You pay for a site to represent you online in terms of style, and corporate identity. The theme involves conceptualizing the sites graphics and placement of objects such that it looks nice and is easy to use.
Some sites may look simpler than others, but they fit the owner’s corporate identity and deliver content in a way that’s intuitive to its audience. This is the designer’s number 1 objective. The idea is you pay for him to create a theme that suits you. You can also use a template, pre-designed for public use, which is cheaper, but sharing a theme with everybody else doesn’t appeal to most website owners.

Value

how much is the design worth to you. If you think it’s important you are more likely to find someone experienced to design your website, to avoid nasty surprises down the road. You will also pay them to take the extra effort to give you something better than your competitors. You also pay to take advantage of the years spent polishing their skills. Bigger companies have the money to invest in their online branch and have more to gain so are willing and able to cough out chunks of cash. Small companies and individuals are more cautious about price and may end up going for cheap, at the risk of getting a design that does not suit them as much, which could turn out to be expensive for them in the long run, in terms of loss of business due to the fact that their competitors have better designed sites or their site scares away customers or isn’t as impact-full as it should be. So the price also depends on how important it is to you.

From my google research a site can cost anything from 25$ for a template to 35,000$ or more, so… how much would I charge for a website design? “It depends…”