Website Design and Publishing by Mel Miller

I am frequently asked to design and publish website for small businesses.  One of the major factors for any business is cost, and how much website development, publishing and hosting will cost are a primary consideration. Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors which impact on cost.  These include things like: How many pages?  Do you want custom graphics on each page?  Do you want a custom logo created? Do you have photos you want incorporated into the site design or content?  Do you have specific text you want on each page?  Are you selling a product (s) or services?  Do you want to sell products from your website (i.e shopping cart)? Do you need custom forms like customer/visitor information requests? Really, the list can be quite daunting. So what are some answers?

Website Hosting I do not host websites.  I can recommend several hosting agencies which I have worked with and have shown to have fast, reliable connections and provide domain registration, domain email and other hosting package options.  Because I use Front Page (now Expression Web), the site I am expected to publish a website to must support "Front Page Extensions".  The costs will vary based on the provider but you should be able to get a lot of services for $12-$25 per month, including:  unlimited downloads (bandwidth usage on your site); 25-100 domain email addresses; unlimited uploads to your site; and unlimited storage.  Be sure to read the fine print, because unlimited doesn't really mean unlimited.  But, the average, genuine small business website isn't going to exceed reasonable unlimited limits. Website Design Let's start with some basics.  For a 5-6 page website my basic fee is $350...IF You are providing me specific text for the pages, digital images of logos, pictures and graphics you want incorporated into the site design and the site does not require a shopping cart. If your site requires more than 5-6 pages; or if you need photos digitized, or custom graphics, custom email forms, discussion groups, forums, shopping carts, then my basic fee is $350 plus $25/hr. for graphics/image work and $35/hr. for custom forms. Although its more in $$, this is a pretty good deal because I seldom charge for the number of hours I actually spend trying to be creative on your behalf.

If you want more information about website design and costs, contact me via email.  You can locate my email address on my resume, elsewhere on this site.