pre-planning
Ideally, a website with a maximum of three decision-makers is planned in a maximum of two hours. Surely one or the other entrepreneur already has experience in planning their own homepage. In your meeting, the basic cornerstones should be recorded as a wish list. For this wish list you should define at least the following points

Website Goals (See our workbook for more)
range of functions
Graphic Alignment/Layout
Creation and maintenance of content (attention: GDPR!)
hosting
You can also find out how best to plan your website in advance in > this article.

No matter how and by whom your company has its website created: You will not be able to avoid the time required for the preliminary planning of the website if you want to implement your new online presence professionally.

Effort for pre-planning:

Own employees at least 2 hours
External service provider: at least 2 hours

Domain & hosting
We recommend hosting with a large web hosting provider that has been on the market for a while. We had our best experiences with all inclusive and Hetzer. There are also hosting providers that we strongly advise against, but out of respect for their obligations to their employees and their jobs, we will not discuss this publicly here. But you are welcome to contact us directly.

With an all-inclusive hosting package (our favourite), you get a gross annual price of just under €86. Including 5 domains, SSL certificate, unlimited data transfer, mail server with solid spam filter and first class support. This package is our recommendation. We use it for most of our customers.

web design
This depends on the goals mentioned above that you are pursuing with your website. One thing is definitely clear: the website should visually reflect your company and your other means of communication, such as brochures, social media accounts or company vehicles. Therefore, the task is to develop a design that places a great deal of focus on conveying the content and presents your products or services in such a way that the visitor is ready to contact you quickly.

At this point, if we assume a modern website design that offers both and also adapts well to display on mobile phones, then you can hire a smaller regional agency for the design with costs between €1,000 and €2,000 just for the creation of the first one calculate drafts.

The design is cheaper if the agency uses existing templates and only customizes colors, fonts and design elements. This is possible, for example, with the WordPress system. You can also choose your favorite design on various platforms in advance, such as themeforest.net or templatemonster.com.

You can then send the best suggestions to the agency. Then let the agency advise you on whether these suggestions are suitable for your website. From a technical point of view, another theme may be better, but the design can then be based on your ideas. You can reduce the web design costs by a good half with this, even if you accept a loss of individuality.

Web design costs:

Template (templates): from 0 €
Adaptation of a template by an agency: from approx. €500
individual design: €1,000 to €2,000

Technical implementation
Depending on the desired functions and the number of pages, the costs for further implementation can vary greatly.

If you have a small business and only consider a so-called web business card to be sufficient, then you might have 6-8 subpages and a few picture galleries that can also be displayed well on mobile phones, as well as a good, robust contact form. The total costs for this can be between €2,000 and €3,000.

If you want to have an extended range of functions, e.g.

Integration of external result tables
Blog area + newsletter setup and registration option
Contact person management
Landing pages, possibly with a funnel for lead generation
store area
Then the additional costs can quickly rise to €5,000.
Costs for technical implementation:

Small web business card: between €1,500 and €2,500
Extended range of functions: from €2,500
Solid shop: between €5,000 and €20,000, depending on the range of functions, interfaces and overall size.

maintenance and updating
The technical maintenance of the website includes, for example, updating the plugins (tools used to integrate a wide variety of functions) and the system for systems such as WordPress. This is done for security reasons (protection against hacker attacks) and to maintain the compatibility of different tools.

In addition, annual costs for license fees are added to many systems extensions and plugins. The annual costs for this vary between €500 and €1,500 net, depending on the range of functions.

Legal certainty and GDPR compliance
Please do not rely solely on the advice of the agency if your company has not appointed a data protection officer (internal or external). Because an agency or a web designer is not legal counsel and is not liable in the event of a warning. We therefore recommend consulting a specialist lawyer.

In the best case, the agency of your choice works together with a lawyer who specializes in the field of IT law, for example. Experience has shown that the costs for a simple website for the one-off, legally secure setup and text creation should not exceed €1,000. Please keep in mind that the legal situation can change or third-party providers of Internet technologies, such as Google or Facebook, can change their conditions. In such a case, it is necessary to check whether the content of your legal texts needs to be changed.

Rule of thumb: If you offer products or services for sale directly to the public via your website, then you should also publish the appropriate terms and conditions on the website in an easily accessible manner.

External specialist lawyer: from approx. 750 € – depending on which legal texts have to be created for your website.

Content / Content Marketing
Maintaining website content is an often neglected factor in a company’s website. Your business thrives on talking about your business. The social media area on the Internet is suitable for this. You create even more trust if you regularly provide new content on your own website that offers the visitor added value.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s blogs (news about past and upcoming projects or about the company) or customer testimonials: If the visitors are not provided with up-to-date information, the website can be implemented professionally in terms of design and function: visiting the website several times does not represent any added value The visitors don’t come back a second time. And as is well known, customers do not always buy on first contact.

For your company, this definitely means more time. You either create the texts entirely yourself or collect and forward information in order to commission an external agency to create the texts. As a rule, the costs for creating a new blog entry plus distribution in the social media channels are between approx. €50 and €200. In addition, additional costs or working time for the creation of photos or videos may arise.

Content marketing costs: approx. €50 – €200 plus time and costs for photos or videos

Conclusion
The commissioning of a professional agency entails one-time and, if necessary, additional monthly costs. Depending on the scope, these are between €2,000 and €5,000 or annual costs between €500 and €2,000. Therefore, plan your budget and plan your goals. What do you want to achieve with your website?

The exact price of a website is determined by the specific requirements. A website can be as small as an extended business card and add next to no value. Or it brings you an inexhaustible flow of customers because it is cleverly structured and a healthy online marketing biotope has been activated around it.

A note at the end: The above information is not a binding price for our services, but is merely a rough average of the costs that local agencies may incur.