Sillybean

How much does a website cost?

Last fall, my friend Sarah and I gave a talk on web design for her RWA chapter. We sent out a little survey ahead of time to find out what people wanted to know — and, implicitly, how much they knew about web design in general. (I didn’t think I was going to find much web experience in the group, but I wanted to make sure. Talking basics to a room full of bored experts is a special kind of hell.)

The one question that came up in nearly every survey response was “how much does it cost?”

The answer is complicated and depends on your value of “it.” Are you doing the site yourself or hiring someone? Should you invest in industrial-grade software or make do with something less powerful? Are you published yet? — i.e., is the purpose of your site to sell books, or to help you make contacts in the industry prior to publishing?

If your answer to the last question is “it’s just a personal site,” go have a beer or something. What I’m going to talk about for the next few days is what it takes to get a professional site going.

With that in mind:

Hiring a Professional

• $35+/hour
• maintenance rate/contracts

There are a slew of other questions that stem from this: What do you look for in a professional developer? What isn’t worth your time and money? How can you tell good developers from bad? What are their dirty little secrets?

I’ll get to those later. It’s a big topic and includes a couple of rants.

First, let’s talk software for the do-it-yourself crowd. You’ll note that some software is listed in bold; those are the ones I recommend.

Do-it-yourself

HTML editing

• Adobe GoLive – $400
• Macromedia Dreamweaver – $380
• NVU – free

Dreamweaver is the gold standard among web professionals. If your budget is tight, pick somewhere else to skimp. Your HTML editor must be good, and this one has a lot going for it. It writes XHTML compliant code. It renders most CSS-based layouts without a hitch, meaning you can edit them in WYSIWYG mode. Its site management features are second to none; it’ll manage internal links, meaning if you change a file’s name or location within the Dreamweaver window, it’ll correct links to that file in all your other pages. You can upload and download from the site window, even if you’ve selected files in different subdirectories, and you can choose to synchronize all or part of the site if you’re not sure which files you changed. DW can handle SFTP or WebDAV connections if your host demands security (mine does). There’s a site-wide search and replace. And here’s a big one: templates. You create one or two templates containing the basic layout of your site, and then you base the rest of your pages on those. When you need to change the layout, you change the template file and the rest of the pages are updated to match.

Other editors will do most of those things, but not all. If you truly can’t afford Dreamweaver, try NVU. It’s still in development, but it’s looking good. GoLive is more expensive than Dreamweaver and always a few steps behind in its features; don’t bother with it.

Under no circumstances should you use FrontPage. It is a plague upon the web. It doesn’t write standard HTML; it doesn’t even write vaguely correct HTML. It’s a tool for turning Word and Powerpoint files into things Internet Explorer can sort of read, and it does even that badly.

If you do need to convert Word files to HTML (something I do every day at work), there are a number of happy little utilities to help you out. First, save as HTML from Word. Then run the resulting file through one of these:

• HTML Tidy
• Textism.com Word cleaner
• Word Unmunger
• Dreamweaver’s built-in Word HTML cleaner

(Did I mention that Dreamweaver is cool?)

Image editing

• Adobe Photoshop – $600
• Macromedia Fireworks – $300
• JASC Paint Shop Pro – $120
• Adobe Photoshop Elements – $100
• GIMP – free

Image editors are a good place to save some cash. (You shouldn’t be dealing with too many images other than your book covers; I’ll talk more about that later.) Photoshop is the professional’s tool, but it’s serious overkill for a basic site. Photoshop Elements is a good choice. So are Paint Shop Pro and GIMP. Really, just about anything that will resize a photo will do here. Image organizers like iPhoto are no good for this job, though.

Upgrading

Upgrades for these are available every 2 years or so (maybe less). Always use the latest version of your HTML editing software — the changes between versions tend to be drastic. If you’re a version or two behind on the image apps, you won’t be missing too much.

Other costs

• time & training
  • time away from writing
  • books
• hosting
  • montly: no more than $10/month
  • setup: no more than $25, one time

Don’t underestimate the amount of time and energy it takes to learn this stuff. That’s why they pay us the big medium-sized bucks.

Hosting is a topic for another day. However, the cost guidelines apply whether you’re building the site yourself or hiring someone else.