Tablets and phones changed web design for ever, much to the financial detriment of the designer and the benefit of the customer. Only honest and ethical web developers and designers will admit this.
While the technologies powering individual websites can be different, every modern website must be mobile responsive, which means it must adhere to the multi-column framework Bootstrap pioneered.
Today, nearly all of the tools necessary to spin up a site for a client are standardized, and every professional tool and resource used in creating a website comes out of the box with a “mobile first” experience. There is no such thing as a Custom Website anymore- they are all tailored to fit the client.
That’s it, that’s the dirty secret of the web design industry that almost no one admits, because they’d have to acknowledge they are price-gouging their clients.
15 years ago, when I started building websites and web applications I warned people that if you spent less than $1,000 on a website, buy you something bloated and riddled with security issues outsourced to a digital sweat shops India or China. I was right.
Today, that’s not the case. The technology is actually the easy part. Good servers are affordable, and the software is solid. I’ve been building on WordPress and the Genesis Framework, long before they both became ubiquitous, because I knew the code was rock solid, secure and fast.
There is always an amount of coding, configuring and tailoring required on every website- this is inescapable, but frankly, major determining price factor amount of content that needs to be created. That’s it. Anyone suggesting otherwise, is trying to justify their pricing.
