I got this question at Chicago's Flourish Conference, where someone in the early planning stages of a website project was trying to make sense of the wide range of quotes they were getting from consultants. It's a fairly common question at conferences, given how much conflicting information is out there. Instead of ducking the question with a "It depends on the website...it could be $500 or $5M" (the usual consultant's response), I'll attempt to answer it a little more directly here.

The typical professionally developed website project, handled by a consulting firm with a good track record, good support, and good post-launch follow-through, costs $10k. If you're looking for something a little more involved, especially if the words "ecommerce" or "integration" are being used, the project will probably start closer to $20k. These websites involve custom design and branding to guarantee usability, involved information architecture for hundreds (or thousands) of pages of content, custom functionality development, social media functionality, sophisticated internet marketing and / or traffic analysis, and complex data integration with nonprofit databases. These are also the website projects that consulting firms need to stay profitable; this is why there is a marked drop in interest in website projects with smaller budgets.

Does this mean all of our nonprofit clients with less than $10k should be worried? Not at all. We regularly build websites for nonprofits with much smaller budgets. The important thing is to understand that this is an exercise in compromise, to bring you the functionality and design that will best further your mission without forcing your budget up to the normal for-profit consulting levels. If all you're looking for is a few pages of mostly static content (such as an "About us" page, a "Contact us" page, etc) along with an easily updatable blog, perhaps with the ability to handle content in multiple languages, and you're happy to work with a customized version of an existing design template instead of a completely unique design built from scratch, you can build a very attractive, powerful, and effective web presence for half the usual price (and often less).

As budgets grow tighter in the current economy, of course, we're getting an increasing number of questions about even smaller budgets. If you've got a budget of $500 or $1k, while the options are limited, it's still possible to get an effective web presence. Some of the compromises you'll make:

• Standardized design. You'll have to select from an existing pool of design templates; there's very little room for customization in a $1k budget. With some design implementations, you'll be able to change colors and even make some layout changes yourself, without having to learn code, but this will always be more limited than a completely custom design engagement with an experienced designer.
• A lack of higher-end functionality. At the $1k level, there is no room for custom content types, custom content workflows, ecommerce integration, or CRM systems to track constituent data.
• Limited hosting options. Most consultants will want to use their own preferred hosting environments at lower budget levels. This isn't because hosting is a profit-maker for us (quite the opposite - we make a loss on hosting!) but because this standardizes our working environment, and our developers have no surprises in setting up your installation. Since setup and troubleshooting a new hosting environment can cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars, keeping this overhead to a minimum on a $1k project is critical.
• A lack of interested consultants. Sadly, as I mentioned above, most consulting companies can't make a real profit at this price point, and are geared toward larger projects. You'll have a harder time finding a consulting shop to handle a $1k project, and then finding support for it afterward.
• A lack of non-development time. This is another serious drawback for some nonprofits, but at the $1k level, a consulting shop simply can't spend a lot of time writing detailed proposals for custom development work, having weeks of in-person planning and architecture meetings, and presenting mockups or wireframes to your board for approval; this would eat up your entire budget before breaking ground on the project.

Having said that, however, you may be surprised at what you get to keep:

• Editable websites. Powerful content management systems like Drupal can be deployed very easily. This means you can still add, edit, and delete website content, manage navigation menus, add blog entries, and generally administer an impressive web presence without being forced to learn HTML code or other tech skills.
• Multimedia handling. As part of our standard implementations, we can include support for third party audio and video through services like Vimeo or YouTube. You won't be able to run your own hosted multimedia servers, but you'll certainly be able to use audio and video to tell your organization's story.
• Social media functionality. Need users to be able to comment on your news items or blog posts? Need an RSS feed, so you can syndicate content elsewhere on the internet, perhaps to your Facebook page? How about a widget to let your users share your content on social networking sites? These are relatively standard features for a modern website, and should be possible to implement without breaking the bank.
• Attractive design. Although custom design may be out of the question, several attractive, professionally designed templates are available, and more are being added daily. Using an existing template can create an attractive, usable site design on a tight budget.

In my experience, these benefits far outweigh what most organizations can accomplish if they have non-techies attempt to build the website internally instead (using something like Dreamweaver, or Wordpress), or if they go with an amateur or semi-professional web hobbyist (this usually starts out with a referral to a friend's friend's son who is learning web development in college, or a relative who has a background in print design and wants to build a web portfolio for future web design work). The challenge, of course, is finding a professional consulting company with the interest and experience to tackle this kind of project, and a model that makes it sustainable.

Developing websites that help you achieve your mission at tight budget levels is challenging, to say the least. We're currently working on ways to deploy standardized Drupal implementations for very small projects, for the organizations who are normally turned away by consultants; a more optimistic answer to this question may arrive later this summer, with any luck.