Why do high-end web design agencies charge so much?
If you've ever talked to web design agencies operating at the top end of the market, you'll find that their estimates on the cost of a website seem wildly extravagant compared to what a smaller agencies are offering. There's plenty of web design and development firms that won't even look at a project for less than six figures, and once they get going you can expect to push seven.
On the surface of things, this seems bizarre. You can get a perfectly acceptable, albeit basic, custom designed and developed website for less than $10k, so why the vast disparity in cost? The simple truth is that both businesses are charging you for the amount of time their staff spend on your website, and that the company operating at the big end of town is putting a lot more work into your website than what a small agency is.
A lot of this work comes from the multiple roles that are assigned to a project. The larger the agency, they break down their offering into increasingly specialised job roles. At a small agency, you might get a single designer assigned to your project, at a large agency, you might get a Solution Architect, a User Experience designer, a Creative Director and a Graphic Designer. The outcome is the same - you end up with a design for your website - but at the large agency, they've done a LOT more work to get there.
The same happens during development. You may get a single developer at a small agency, at large web design agencies you might get a Project Lead, Senior / Lead Developer, Front End Developer, Back End Developer and Quality Assurance assigned to your project. A whole TEAM of developers to churn out your website, versus one.
Why do big agencies assign so many people to a project, if small agencies can deliver with only a handful? For two reasons: firstly, getting all those specialised resources into a project means that the outcome is more reliably of a high quality. It doesn't guarantee it, but it helps. Secondly, it's because that's what their clients are asking for! The sorts of clients the big agencies work with expect to see teams of resources assigned to the project - the big agencies are just responding to customer demand.
Assembler is a web design agency based in Perth, Western Australia. This blog is intended to be an informal, behind the scenes look into the web design and development industry. If you like our content, please follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook!