Building an e-commerce site is not inexpensive. But for established companies and brands, the benefits can be almost immediate.

^{...................}

Web site development costs climbing

You need to build a significant presence on the Web now, because costs will continue to climb. Costs for Web development are up once again in 2000, according to the July 2000 NetMarketing Web Price Index.

The average cost for a 'small' website has risen to $113,500 (up 46% from $77,500; September, 1999), including the following services:

• Look and feel (design/site mapping)
• Hosting (for secure transactions)
• Publishing tools
• Shopping cart
• E-commerce solution for the purchase

And once you get to a larger sized website, the cost skyrockets to $608,000, up 50% from September, 1999. The 'large' website would include the following services:

• Server hosting and maintenance
• Publishing tools
• Custom programming/development of Java applets, locator and Shockwave files.
• Search engine
• Database development (for its content and its users)
• Secure transaction capability
• Shopping cart system

^{...................}

A category-leader site even more

The median 1999 price quoted for CubicleMax by the leading US developers was $479,250, with a high-end of $1.2 million.

^{...................}

Why the higher prices?

Several factors may be responsible, from the continued rapid growth of the still-young industry of Web development to the higher cost of doing business to greater expectations from clients.

There is increased expectations on the client side. Chris Swain, head of production at New York's R/GA Interactive, said: "The bar is raised on what a company has to build to get something acceptable into the market. Our clients have now been around the block a bit."

^{...................}

How Our Fees are calculated

We do not bid a flat rate for large web site design projects. This is so because there are so many variables that simply cannot be predicted accurately. In addition, our experience has shown that once a project begins, there are many "adjustments" and amendments desired by management and others, which cannot be fairly absorbed into a flat quote for a project.

The rationale behind our pricing is based upon rates contained in The Web Price Index Rate Card, by Matt Carmichael and Mary Morrison. The rate card is compiled from data surveys of design businesses nationwide.

^{...................}

Down to the Minute

In order to accurately track the time spent on the web design implementation, we use a proprietary system which tracks actual time our employees spend within each program used. In this manner, the exact time spent for each task is accurate down to a one minute interval. This way, you don't get over-billed for a service.

The project tracker is aware of more than 200 popular applications used in everyday work, among which are illustration, page layout, image editing, web design, word processing, 3D modeling, animation, CAD, database, spreadsheet, presentation, sign design, scanning and optical character recognition applications.

After a project is defined, the project tracker runs and begins working with the applications, as they are launched and open and close documents.

It is possible to view the project statistics and see which documents were open, time spent on them and amount due by the client. Also, project reports can be printed, and projects can be archived for future reference as well as exported to any database application that supports text delimiter files.

Are you ready for IMC to take you on the web?