How much should I be paying for a website?

   I am sure you have heard the term, you get what you paid for! for the most part that is true.

   There is no set price for how much a web design will cost you. It all depends on how much the person or company will charge you for it.

   When talking about "price" it really means how much money you will spend.

Misconceptions of the buyer picking a designer.

# 1 "All web designers can do the same job as the next one, its all about how much they will charge me! Right?" --

Wrong!

Every web designer has different levels of skills on what they can, and can not do. Every designer has strong points and weak points.

That goes for individuals or multiple person company putting your site together. Some can create some awesome graphics and can not get your position in the search engines. While others can be just the opposite.

How am I supposed to know who is good or who is bad to choose on designing our website?

Well evaluate that person or companies client list of sites. Please keep in mind all sites perform at different levels. What I want you to see is if they perform the basic things to get your site seen.
Make a list of web designers you are interested in.
Under each designer list like 5 of their latest client jobs URL's
Lets go to the fist link to see how they fair.
open this link in a new window. Domaintools.com
for now just give a point for sites for items in purple which show positive status
put each URL into the form and submit it. take special note of.
Website Title:
- has a proper name in it and not PAGE 1 or Welcome.
That Meta Description AND Meta Keywords
- that both are used and have relevant words listed.
Look at SEO Score & Meta Relevance
- The higher the score the better the optimization was done on the site.
Terms How unique is this content and how many words are linked!
Images No ones perfect if a few tags are missing but if all of them are missing then things need to be corrected.
Links status of site links and how many are links going away from your site.
After you have made your list you can clearly start to see which sites are scoring better then others. You will also have to note that after web designers complete a web site, those site owners might go in and alter their own sites causing the performance to go up or down.
What I look for is if a site does not come up with any scores, or missing meta tags, that means that the site was just made for looks only. Be careful when you hire someone to design your site, they may just give you a pretty look, if the basic tags and pages where not labeled or meta tags not written your site has a slim chance of being positioned in the search engines.
Ok next test. Lets go to a web crawler simulator. How well can a crawler see your site? Open this link in a new window to test a site. Webconfs.com
What are we looking for? Type in the URL of the site, what this does is gives you the eyes of a web crawler. What happens is many people designs site with those high graphic designs and fonts. They save the contents and labels in images. It is those images that do not get seen, like sites done completely in flash. Flash is a great visual presentation of a site, but flash needs to be limited up to a point. Spidered Text get a plus point if all the text on a site page is seen. If the simulator cant see your page content, then the search engine will understand you have no content on your pages. Spidered Links hopefully all the links are seen that are there. If the links are done in a code which the spider can not see, then the crawler will not list other pages in that site. If a spider can not see the next link to visit it will understand there are no other link in that site to visit. If the needed links to the next page are not seen this is an outright bad score.
Meta Keywords get a plus point if the page keywords are seen and done properly..
Meta Description get a plus point if the page description is seen and describe properly.