How much does it cost to build a website ?

[FredNL]

An e-commerce website (ready2start) at paibkk.com starts at 250 THB/year. Many layouts to choose from.

Everything in 2 languages English and Thai. Multiple currencies (standard USD and THB enabled). Also includes several payment gateways like; Paysbuy (Credit cards, debit cards, counter payments), PayPal, Moneybookers, Western Union.

Choose the package, layout, pay online, add your products / categories, enable the payment gateway and you have yourself a first class working e-commerce website.

Don't let others rob you. I have seen prices here in Thailand 4 to 5 times the normal price in the USA or EU.

Edited July 11, 2014 by FredNL

[JoeCL]

I sent you a private message with the subject line: Web Site Construction

Edited July 11, 2014 by JoeCL

[INV]

Some one say Elance.com in a post and sure there you find good company that do this good. I used freelancer.com and its great. Make sure you pick a company that have a lot of good reviews and I mean at least 30+ reviews.They will give also you a specified document exactly what will be done.Just ask for that if they dont offer it right away.The best thing with sites like freelancer.com is that you dont pay anything until its done as you order it.They have what is called milestones so split payments after some part is done or all after complete if thats agreed on.

[FredNL]

I have found some normal prices for a website with or without an e-commerce solution

In case you want your own designed website we are talking in Thailand about 1,000 THB per hour for the designer.

Website hosting:

• 10Gb webspace, 2000 Mb/month traffic, 3 databases, 750 THB/year
• 15Gb webspace, unlimited traffic, 7 databases, 1000 THB/year
• Up to Unlimited webspace, traffic, databases for 3000 THB/year

Domain registration:

• .com, .net, .org, .name, .us for 400 THB/year
• co.th 1200 THB/year

At http://paibkk.com they can also help you with this. They are new in Thailand but the main company was the first in Europe (1993).

I believe a whole e-commerce package with 12 themes/templates to choose from, including website hosting and 1 .com domain for 6,000 THB/year.

For 500 THB (???) per hour they will also adjust the website to your standards and add categories/products to it. Best deal here in Thailand for having a total website management.

Just check them out: http://www.paibkk.com

[belg]

educate yourself and it will be free forever

[thaicookingchef]

Don't use any free platform that some people who do not know what they are talking about advise...

Find a farang developper on vacation and he will do a great job for you for cheap from his hotel room during his extended vacation...

[rhodie]

Find a site that suits what you want.Then post that link and ask for a price. Much easier to get a realistic quote.,

Good luck.

[thairookie]

Don't use any free platform that some people who do not know what they are talking about advise...

Find a farang developper on vacation and he will do a great job for you for cheap from his hotel room during his extended vacation...

That is funny

[thairookie]

Find a site that suits what you want.Then post that link and ask for a price. Much easier to get a realistic quote.,

Good luck.

Great idea !

[khunPer]

Anything from 0 (zero) to millions of Dollars.

Many sites you easily can build your own pro-looking web-site for nothing, try for example Wix...

If you want a professional web-site with special programming, it will cost you from anything between a reasonable amount to something most perople (and investors) don't like to hear (plus an unforseen factor of maybe 3) – all depanding of what you need/want...

A very plain 5-page site with no special programming, all texts made ready (no copywriting), and available graphics that don't need to much PhotoShopping, can probably be done from something like 10,000 baht and up (5,000 for basic design + 1,000 each page)...

Edited July 11, 2014 by khunPer

[thairookie]

Find a site that suits what you want.Then post that link and ask for a price. Much easier to get a realistic quote.,

Good luck.

Okay, let's put aside domain name and web hosting etc. I think I can figure that out based on websites like hostgator and bluehost etc.

I'm looking at Wordpress because it's faster, and more importantly, I don't need a programmer to do php programming for my site from scratch.

Let's consider this Wordpress template. It comes with a shopping cart. How much does it cost to get someone to customize it ?

http://themeforest.net/item/sushi-responsive-restaurant-theme/full_screen_preview/6190608

And as one previous poster pointed out, the cost of customizing a shopping cart excludes uploading the shopping items. Is that the industrial norm ?

[Ridercnx808]

all the free platforms suck for SEO

all the cms packaged platforms suck for SEO

all wordpress sites suck for SEO (unless you pay for an ongoing plugin)

no SEO = no traffic = no customers

best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of google.

[Beetlejuice]

Wow, this is big business and sounds like a quick and easy way to make a lot of money as we used to say in the old days; for old rope. I can bash out a basic professional website, either using File Transfer Protocol or templates within a couple of hours, then perhaps another 2 days to establish the design and add all the finery.

For people who lack IT technology savvy it`s going to cost them dear and they are at the mercies of third parties. Probably cheaper for them in the long term to take a website creation course.

If I were running a company I want everything under my control and not in the hands of others, including a website, from those who seem to be able to name their own price and have the power to hold a website to ransom with their customers. For the customers this appears to be a mugs game.

My advice is this; it is not so difficult creating and designing a website as many may believe and there are millions of well established sites online that can be used for examples as guidelines for designing your own sites. Take the plunge and begin with a basic free website host and experiment then progress onto making more advanced websites. For someone that is keen, this can be archived within 2 weeks or maybe a month at the most for the absolute beginners and then it becomes something like riding a bicycle, once mastered, never forgotten plus it can also be fun. Otherwise for those who consider the cost of acquiring a website is no object and want to boost up the bank account balances of others for doing very little, then good luck to all who sail in her.

I also advise the OP to check that those offering to create websites for him for a stack of cash are suitably qualified, experienced and have work permits to undertake the job, otherwise he will have no comebacks it if turns out to be a load of crap and possibly face major problems if the so-called service has difficulties or fails to maintain the site for the longer term or the host is crap with loads of downtime or disappears completely and the site ends up being deleted.

Edited July 11, 2014 by Beetlejuice

[bangkapi]

If you know more about how to do it yourself, then it will cost you less.

[yankee99]

Find a site that suits what you want.Then post that link and ask for a price. Much easier to get a realistic quote.,

Good luck.

Okay, let's put aside domain name and web hosting etc. I think I can figure that out based on websites like hostgator and bluehost etc.

I'm looking at Wordpress because it's faster, and more importantly, I don't need a programmer to do php programming for my site from scratch.

Let's consider this Wordpress template. It comes with a shopping cart. How much does it cost to get someone to customize it ?

http://themeforest.net/item/sushi-responsive-restaurant-theme/full_screen_preview/6190608

And as one previous poster pointed out, the cost of customizing a shopping cart excludes uploading the shopping items. Is that the industrial norm ?

Thats a 250-350 dollar site done on elance. Just post a ad there for free link that site and watch the bids come in. And remember when selecting a programer due diligence is required but your money is prorected in escrow.

Shopping carts , YouTube, fb paypal etc is no extra just specify it when you advertise your job.

[Berinek]

can do it for you for 15,000 Baht and it will be already prepared code for e-commerce which can be added anytime you want. If you will decide to start e-commerce then basic setup and necessary functions will be another about 8,000 - 10,000 baht. Then you can manage the site yourself very easily and add or edit pages or products according to your needs. Site will be SEO optimized and the code used is guaranteed to be loved by search engines. Re hosting we can use some of well known US companies which are about 100 - 150 USD per year. But first I would analyze where your traffic will be generated from. If for example you expect traffic only from UK then it will be the best to put hosting into UK server etc. I would deffinitely not use any of cheap "make yourself" company solutions because these are usualy very limited and not well optimised for search engines.

[thairookie]

Thats a 250-350 dollar site done on elance. Just post a ad there for free link that site and watch the bids come in. And remember when selecting a programer due diligence is required but your money is prorected in escrow.

Shopping carts , YouTube, fb paypal etc is no extra just specify it when you advertise your job.

Is there any after sales service with elance ? For 250 -200 USD I might end up with someone from India.

[manarak]

Far too many veriables. You can go do it yourself now on many sites, easy step by step all in one solutions.

You could be easy led to "technical" specialists and can go from a few thousand baht to hundreds of thousands dependant on what you need and what you want to achieve.

It also depends on what you know and how easily someone could convince you ,of what you need.

You know I tried so hard to pre-empt "it depends" answer in my question.

Maybe I should rephrase it.

For those who have engaged others (not DIY) to do your website, how much did you pay ? How "sophisticated" is your website ?

Would appreciate if you could share some bit of information.

I can quote on OP's questions:

- simple 5-page static site: 30.000 baht, possible commercial template and paid content have to be paid separately, website design does not include any other work than the website just the raw website (no domainname, no hosting, no email, no SEO, no ftp, etc.).

- e-commerce site with shopping cart and payment gateway: same conditions and price as the above.

I choose the software. Shop comes with no products and although the software will support a wide range of payment gateways, they will not work until the shopowner gets a payment services contract with one of the payment providers.

I can also throw in multilanguage, stock management, newsletter, discounts, etc.

How can both cost the same?

Well, the work designing a 5 page static website including content is not much less than the work to install and configure an empty e-commerce site.

That being said, both site types are fairly standard, so filling a template with content in the first case is straightforward and in the second case, readily available opensource software provides everything a shop needs.

If one wants a website to achieve something specific that requires a custom database and custom scripts with sophisticated functions, the cost will be much higher and it is impossible to throw a ballpark figure before sitting down with the client and drawing up an exact specification.

Putting something online is easy and fast, the real work is to fill the website with content and to embed it correctly into the internet ecosystem.

I also would like to add that so-called "hosted solutions" can be costly at the end in the best case or costly and useless in the worst case.

With all these hosted solutions, the basic functionality is free nearly free, but when you want to have more functionality, they go like: payment gateway 10 USD/month, multilingual 10 Usd per language, more than 100 products 20 USD, stock management 30 USD, hosted newsletter mailings 50 USD, ... etc...

Plus, it is very possible that the products and clients, orders database cannot be extracted in a usable format to easily transfer it to another system, if you buy the domain name through them, you might in the end not be domain owner or it could take ages to transfer it to another registrar...

Also... changing stuff in the source code? oh, sorry, only our premium developers can help you...

I try to avoid them and prefer more flexible, totally free opensource systems such as Zencart (already old tech, but works well).

Some systems such as Prestashop work on a free + premium model, meaning one can pay for additional modules or try to use free modules developed by the community. One can also modify the opensource code himself.

I used prestashop for one shop, and while it's not completely bad, I was apalled by the number of bugs left in the software as well as missing crucial functionality which can be added with premium modules (QED).

To get the shop working, I had to fix 3 bugs in their source code (nightmare) and find a handful of workarounds.

The comment that free systems cannot do SEO is wrong, once you understand what on-site SEO really is, you can do everything you want with a link formatting function and a page header controller inside your system and with apache's mod rewrite.

It's not that difficult but requires a lot of thought and planning and some coding if the functions are not already provided by the system (yes, most systems struggle with this).

Edited July 12, 2014 by manarak

[yankee99]

Thats a 250-350 dollar site done on elance. Just post a ad there for free link that site and watch the bids come in. And remember when selecting a programer due diligence is required but your money is prorected in escrow.

Shopping carts , YouTube, fb paypal etc is no extra just specify it when you advertise your job.

Is there any after sales service with elance ? For 250 -200 USD I might end up with someone from India.

honestly if depends on your programmer. Some will do small changes at no charge and some will charge. You can and should be making most changes ( content and pics) yourself. If you can't just hire another freelancer. Believe me these Indians are IMHO way faster and better then any thai or falang which I tried to find in Thailand. To be clear I must have been unlucky or looked in the wrong places.

If costs nothing to advertise your job and ask all these question. These guys all want positive feedback like ebay as it gets them work. I needed something done and one guy offered to do it for free just to get good feedback.

[thairookie]

Thats a 250-350 dollar site done on elance. Just post a ad there for free link that site and watch the bids come in. And remember when selecting a programer due diligence is required but your money is prorected in escrow.

Shopping carts , YouTube, fb paypal etc is no extra just specify it when you advertise your job.

Is there any after sales service with elance ? For 250 -200 USD I might end up with someone from India.

honestly if depends on your programmer. Some will do small changes at no charge and some will charge. You can and should be making most changes ( content and pics) yourself. If you can't just hire another freelancer. Believe me these Indians are IMHO way faster and better then any thai or falang which I tried to find in Thailand. To be clear I must have been unlucky or looked in the wrong places.

If costs nothing to advertise your job and ask all these question. These guys all want positive feedback like ebay as it gets them work. I needed something done and one guy offered to do it for free just to get good feedback.

Once you posted a project for bid, would you be penalized by the website if you didn't award the project to any of the bidders (because you didn't find anyone suitable) ?

[olaska]

Wow, a lot of know how and as usual (close to) as many opinions as answers.

YGWYPF. No, it`s not the keyboard but "You Get What You Pay For" and pls don`t be (as an englisgman told me) "Penny clever but Pound stupid"

1st thing to do is to sit down and decide what your site is all about (bling or scyscrapers), promoted by Google or otherwise? etc etc.

If not promoted by Google you can stop read here.

If promoted by Google, the name of the site, the layout, future traffic etc, but very important SEO- wise to research the name (if you are not loaded with money).

It`s a good rule and saying "If you are not at one of the first four results at a Google search, you don`t exist".

What more..... It takes about 5 minutes maximum to set up a standard Wordpress site and I think that could be a good idea for you to learn more how to "communicate" / update your site site.

What most people on the forum seems to have forgotten is security and backups. I can promise you it`s no fun to have your site hacked after ummppff hours of work spolied - and start all over again -!

Well, guess I could write a book about the pro`s and con`s but I don`t want to since I am a retired expat and more and more accustomed to be "Kickiat mak mak"

[yankee99]

Thats a 250-350 dollar site done on elance. Just post a ad there for free link that site and watch the bids come in. And remember when selecting a programer due diligence is required but your money is prorected in escrow.

Shopping carts , YouTube, fb paypal etc is no extra just specify it when you advertise your job.

Is there any after sales service with elance ? For 250 -200 USD I might end up with someone from India.

honestly if depends on your programmer. Some will do small changes at no charge and some will charge. You can and should be making most changes ( content and pics) yourself. If you can't just hire another freelancer. Believe me these Indians are IMHO way faster and better then any thai or falang which I tried to find in Thailand. To be clear I must have been unlucky or looked in the wrong places.

If costs nothing to advertise your job and ask all these question. These guys all want positive feedback like ebay as it gets them work. I needed something done and one guy offered to do it for free just to get good feedback.

Once you posted a project for bid, would you be penalized by the website if you didn't award the project to any of the bidders (because you didn't find anyone suitable) ?

No not in the past.

[Tomtomtom69]

I wouldn't know how much a web site would cost here. I have always designed my own for many years ( most of which are still online). Bus after asking around locally, i believe 20,000 Baht seems to be the local average rate.

Geez that's expensive given the low cost of labour here. Some 10+ years ago I was a freelance website designer in Australia that built a few websites, mostly static ones for different clients including a university professor's project and a couple of others and I charged around A$750 at the time for around 10 pages, including updating. When I tried charging around 800-900 for another client I was rebuffed after that guy told me I was too expensive. I later tried to go down to about 400-500 bucks but I could never get anyone interested after that so my days of being a freelance website designer more or less came to an end then.

If I was able to charge that much in Australia with it's much higher labour costs and still told I was too expensive then one would think that in this day and age, with the internet having developed a lot further than it was back then you'd be able to get someone to put something together here in Thailand for sub 10000 Baht. But you have just proven me wrong, lucifer666.

[olaska]

Just for fun.... I have been working with web development about 16 years in different positions.

Way back then we calculated the time to make the site -and then doubled it mostly because the customers had no idea what they really wanted.

Expected, wanted about 20 % of their budget and questions like: "What is a password, Username, How wide is a broadband, Backup? For what? How? This looks great but....? Database? I have a brother, his son........ (HTML)

Ahhhh, life was so simple then................ and we charged 175 USD / hour and that was crazy money......but cheap if you compare how much the big C's pay their (ignorant) SEO consultants today to rank at Google..............

(Ranked a site yesterday at pos 1,2 and 4 at Google )

[huahinjoe]

I used to freelance in Thailand in the past 9 years and usually the price is start around 15k for professional looking modern responsive (optimized for mobiles and tablets) websites chosen from templates (including hosting, template, stock photos, etc) but in general its better to do with content management system so the owner can take care of it by himself they around 20-25k max and the ones with e-commerce and product import/export, feeds are the more complicated ones these ones need custom coding and start around 25-30k.

Mobile App development is the new business which booming at the moment, more and more business realize they can reach more customers trough mobile sites or smart group apps..

[manarak]

I used to freelance in Thailand in the past 9 years and usually the price is start around 15k for professional looking modern responsive (optimized for mobiles and tablets) websites chosen from templates (including hosting, template, stock photos, etc) but in general its better to do with content management system so the owner can take care of it by himself they around 20-25k max and the ones with e-commerce and product import/export, feeds are the more complicated ones these ones need custom coding and start around 25-30k.

Mobile App development is the new business which booming at the moment, more and more business realize they can reach more customers trough mobile sites or smart group apps..

it will slow down when they realize a responsive website can cover most needs on a mobile device

I'm with bootstrap, it does nicely.

Edited July 15, 2014 by manarak

[Merryman88]

As previously posted how long is a piece of string also as advised in other replies to this post its not just the building of the site that you need to consider.

When you build a website you have to consider how to attract visitors to your site commonly known as Traffic , are you going to achieve this by developing good content on your site that will make it interesting for your visitors to re-visit your site again and again each visit you develop more trust from your traffic, content that engages their interest. This is the best and cheapest way of getting your site ranked on the search engines or are you going to Run adverts on sites like Facebook, twitter twitter and the like to attract customers there is a myriad of ways to attract traffic to your site that will promote your products or services, if you think that by just building a website everyone will know where you are and what you are doing will be become apparent to potential customers, then think again 99% of the skill in having a successful online site is making people aware of you your products and services, are you going to set up an Email list so that you can build up a trust with your customers or are you going to achieve that by engaging your visitors with good and interesting content on your site, the last method is probably the best and most proven it is also the cheapest and easiest to optimize, and monetize.

When someone does a search on one of the search engines they type in what they are looking for we call what they type in a "keyword or keywords" these keywords are instrumental in pointing the searcher in the right direction so your site needs to be ranked on the first pages of the search engines these rankings are achieved by experienced SEO ( site engine optimization) practitioners who are aware of the many ways of doing this for you , their charges alone can be as much as the initial cost of building the web site and has to be done on a continuous basis the usual minimum monthly cost for this service is anything from 50 to as high as 500 $ and more depending on the degree of service required -

What you need to remember is that your website is your business window to the World and will succeed or fail by how professionaly it appears to be managed think of it as your shopfront to over 5 billion plus potentially customers and remember their are as many sharks in this industry as there are honest practitioners - So be very careful who you choose to do your work for you. I have spent over three years in Thailand working up to 8 hours a day 6 days a week learning to skills of this young but very sophisticated industry which by the way is continuously changing.

As far as google one of the largest Search Engines is concerned they are continuously moving the goalposts regarding how they rank all the Blogs and websites they keep changing the algorithms in their search software and changing the ranking search parameters so you can go to bed one night with the third ranking position on page one of the SERPS and wake up the next day with a ranking position on the 20 or 30 or even the 50th Page , so your SEO person has to do his SEO all over again This procedure is an ongoing thing and can only be done by someone with the necessary knowledge and skills.

If you need anymore advice contact me at ray.bowley(at)Gmail.com

I could sit here all day writing about this subject

Merryman88