Excellent question. The answer depends on the complication of the site on day one, year one and year five. There are excellent small, medium and large shops available in the states…and that’s where I’d stay. Going international bring up two major issues. First an in my mind themes important is communication. Everyone I’ve know who gone overseas had had a major communications issue. When English is not the fist language it’s tuff. Plus the American culture is very different and you need a person/company who can think like you culturally.
A site depending on your needs can be as little as $1,000 for a basic information site. to $100,000 fir a very complex e-commerce site with many variations in between based on the functionality that you need.
You need to think about what CMS (content management system) the site is built on too. A CMS allows you to update and change information, photos and even functionality to a degree on your own. The top three CMSs used today are; Drupal used for more complex site, Joomla used for complex and simpler sites and WordPress which is used by many smaller sites. Any of these can be used for easy to complex sites as long as you developers are good.
When you start planning you want to think startup through year five so that you choose the platform that we allow your site to grow without having to throw away what you done in the earlier years.
I’ve attached a questionnaire we use in determining the needs of a potential client. It asks basic question as to best determine what type of site and functionality will be needed. Based on these questions and other that arise from the answers, we put an estimate together.
To use there are two parts to a website. The marketing/creative direction and the development needs. From my experience, Your $20K, depending on your creative and functionality needs should be more than you need. With that said, if you have unusually functionality that requires a lot of custom programming…the cost could easily go higher. But if you need are more on the normal side, most of the functionality is available in the CMS platforms I mentioned and just need to be customized to your needs.
If you need more detail, please feel free to ask me…I hope this helps you to get started.
