This article helps you evaluate or justify the projected cost for your Web Development project. If you have been thinking about developing a web based application or even a simple website but are not sure about its costs then this article will help you come to a price range or even exact costs.

First and foremost it is important to know few technical terms. So I’ll try to give you one liners for help as they will provide clarity on costing.

Website – Collection of html pages. These are usually static pages with fixed contents

Web application – Any software that runs on a web browser.

Web Development – Any kind of programming done for a web application. There are few popular languages today e.g. php, aspx, jsp etc for programming a website

If you need an online presence for your company and need a simple and elegant website then it is very easy to evaluate the costs. The main portion of costing here is for designing a custom layout for your website and translating it into an html page. This cost varies depending upon who is designing it for you. It should cost you in the range of $75 - $ 200 at max for this work. Oh yes, there are few websites which sell ready made templates and they are as low as $50 for each template. Then comes the costing for inner pages on your website like ‘contact us’ page or ‘about us’ page. This should range from $10 - $30 for each page. This way, you can come to a very close estimate on what your website should cost if you need to establish a basic online identity.

The task gets tougher when you have programming involved on your website. This essentially means that you have few pages that pull data from the backend database.

The complexity of the programming needed will usually depend upon how big is your database and what are the dependencies involved between different sets of data.

On larger websites or web applications there are various components that contribute for its costing. The easy part is to separate out the static pages, which are like simple html pages with no database. These pages usually have fixed text or image based contents. Their costing can be estimated based on number of such pages you need on the website.

You can apply the costing formula given in above paragraph for this costing. Do not forget to add the cost for custom design of home page or the template here. It will be needed regardless of any programmable pages on your website.

Then comes the dynamic or data driven pages. For you to estimate this cost, I would recommend you estimate the size of database involved. This is little technical but if you apply some analytical skills you will get a close estimation done. Try to split the application into entities e.g. Customer can be treated as one entity. Consider if you were manually maintaining the database and writing the information on different notepads. How many notepads will you need if one notepad has similar information i.e. 1 notepad to maintain all customer information and 2nd to store all orders placed by your customers. If you can distinctly identify the number of logical entities your application will need, then half the work is done for estimation. You can consider an average of $100 for an individual entity in your application. Multiply with total number of entities and you’ve got the core database cost.

The next step is to determine the number and types of searched involved in the application. A simple search can cost you close to $100 and a more complex one close to $200. If the search results involve any filtering or sorting on the database then expect to pay more for it, in the range of $300 may be.

Next comes the reports in your application. A simple report can cost you around $50 and a more detailed report is generally close to $100. If you further like printing option or multiple browser compatibility then you might have to shed out $150-$200 for each report.

Last, there is an overall integration and implementation costs on the software in general. This involves multiple things like integration, testing, fine tuning. Application setup etc.

For a smaller applications, companies charge in the range of $300 - $500 for this. For bigger applications (which has huge databases with multiple searches and reports) the costs go up in the range of $500 - $1500 or even higher for large scale applications.

If you add individual pieces of information that your application will comprise then you will get a fair idea about estimations on your web application.

At the end of the day, the cost is always governed by the basic principals of supply and demand. If the source from where you buy is in good demand and supply quality products then expect to pay higher than the market standards. On the other hand if the supply is low quality which is less in demand then you will see costs going down substantially from such sources.

This article is a guide line for estimating costs and is a tool to equip you with ideas and components involved on costing and estimating any Web Development project.

To know more or get your project evaluated, please email project details to sales@rginfotechnology for a free estimation.