There are a lot of considerations that you are supposed to make when you are thinking of establishing your own site. You have to be specific about the niche market that you are going to target, have an idea of the layout of the site that you want, or generally speaking, the web design. You also have to be precise about the numbers of pages that you want, the kinds of applications that you want supported, the graphic design elements that you want included and whether you want a content management system. Ultimately when you have all your needs figured out, there is one final decision that you have to make, and it concerns the pricing. You have to be ready to meet the costs of web development, which easily inflate to an insurmountable sum, especially when you have a long list of needs for your website.

How do you calculate web development costs? While from the information above, you can be able to get an estimate more details will be provided below. You should first account for those costs that are outside the web development itself. These are the costs of web hosting, and of domain registration. Web hosting costs vary depending on the hosting package that you want, but generally speaking, this is an expense that you can easily account for. In any case, you will hardly spend over $200 a year, unless you have very diverse needs.

When it comes to calculating web development costs, you should first understand the kind of pricing that you are getting. Some charge by the hour, and while a freelance developer may charge as little as $10, a high profile web development service may charge as high as $400 an hour. It’s a very high expense, but you get an unmatched kind of service. You might be given a quote based on the needs that you have. This kind of pricing is better since it accounts for the whole project, which means you can more accurately budget for it. Others price per package, and in this case, they usually have customized packages for different budgets. You might also find a developer charging by the page, implying that the total cost of developing the website will be based on the number of pages that you want.

You should have your needs stated out so that you know how much you expect to pay. Generally speaking, you can expect to part with more if you are looking for custom graphics, heavy customization, Flash and Java support, CMS, shopping carts and shipping calculation tools for e-commerce sites, enterprise databases and integration of different payment gateways. The more features you want, the more its going to cost you. The total amount of time its going to take to complete the project may affect the final costs, with the rule being, the sooner you want your website running, the more that you will have to pay for it. There are several online resources that offer cost estimation calculators, so you should be able to predict the cumulative cost of web development.