How much does a website cost for a small business in Ann Arbor?
Website quotes for what sounds like the same project routinely differ by a factor of ten. That is not usually dishonesty. It is that the projects are genuinely different underneath a similar description.
What actually drives the number
Page count. A site with six services needs fewer pages than one with eighteen, and page count drives content cost more than build cost.
Who writes the content. This is the biggest single variable. Writing genuinely useful pages for each service — what the work involves, what it costs to get wrong, the local constraints — takes longer than building them. If you supply real material, the project costs meaningfully less. If we run interviews and write it, that is where the hours go.
Design approach. A configured template costs less than something built for your business. Both are legitimate; the template stops being the right answer when it prevents the structure or the performance you need.
Whether structure and performance are in scope. A site that just needs to exist is a different project from one built to rank, with a page per service and a page map planned around real queries.
Migration risk. Replacing a site with existing rankings adds URL mapping, redirects and post-launch verification. It is real work and skipping it is how businesses lose half their traffic.
Where the money should go
If a budget is tight, spend it in this order.
First, structure — a page for each service you want found, organised sensibly. This determines what the site can ever rank for and it is expensive to retrofit.
Second, content on the pages that sell. A plain-looking page with genuinely useful copy outperforms a beautiful page saying nothing.
Third, performance, because it affects both search and conversion. The site should meet Google’s thresholds — largest contentful paint within 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and cumulative layout shift of 0.1 or less.
Visual polish comes after those three. It matters, and it matters less than the list above.
What we would talk you out of
A rebuild you do not need. If the current site can be edited, renders real content and is indexed, the budget usually does more good spent on the execution side of the engagement. A site that merely looks dated is not a reason to spend.
A speed problem sold as a rebuild. Most slow sites are slow for three or four fixable reasons. That is speed work at a fraction of the cost.
Custom functionality nobody uses. Booking systems, client portals and calculators are frequently specified and rarely used by the customers of a small local business. The phone usually wins.
Ownership, which matters more than price
Whatever you pay, establish who owns what. The domain should be registered to you. You should have access to the hosting account. The site should be movable to another developer without permission.
Monthly website arrangements can be fine when they include genuine hosting, maintenance and changes. They are not fine when leaving means losing the site. Ask the question directly before signing, because the answer is much harder to change afterwards.
Getting a number
We quote per project after building a page map with you, because that is the point at which the scope is actually known. It also frequently reduces the number, since the page map often reveals that fewer pages are needed than the initial brief assumed.
The full approach is what we build into every site as standard, and if you already have a site, the more likely conversation is whether it should be redesigned or repaired.
Call 734-747-3922 or request a free audit.
Back to the service this covers: the Web Design service in full.