"A website" covers an enormous range of actual projects, which is why a single price never means much on its own. Before anything else, it helps to know which kind of project you actually need.
Why "a website" isn't one price
A brochure site — a handful of pages presenting a business — is a fundamentally smaller project than an e-commerce store with inventory, payments and order management, which is in turn smaller than a custom web application with logins, dashboards and its own business logic.
Knowing which of these three you actually need, before requesting quotes, makes every quote you get back easier to compare honestly.
What drives the price within each category
Design complexity — a templated layout versus a fully custom design built around your brand — moves the number more than most people expect.
The number of distinct page templates matters more than the number of pages. Ten pages that reuse two layouts cost far less than ten pages that each need their own design.
For e-commerce specifically: payment gateway integration, inventory management, and whether product data needs migrating from an existing system or spreadsheet.
Content migration and copywriting — moving existing content across, or writing new copy from scratch — is real work that's easy to leave out of an early estimate.
Performance and SEO requirements add engineering time up front but are far cheaper to build in from the start than to retrofit later.
Ongoing costs worth planning for
Hosting is an ongoing cost separate from the build. So is maintenance — security updates, dependency upgrades, and fixing anything that breaks as browsers and platforms change underneath a site that isn't actively being touched.
If the site needs regular content updates after launch, it's worth deciding upfront whether your own team will make them or whether that's part of an ongoing arrangement.
How to get an accurate quote
Bring examples of sites whose design quality or functionality you want to match — it's a faster, more accurate way to communicate scope than a written description alone.
Be upfront about what content already exists versus what needs to be written or migrated, and ask directly what happens after launch: is there a maintenance plan, and what does it cover.
Questions to settle before you ask for quotes
Who will update the site after launch, and how often? That decides whether you need a content management system. We compare the options in WordPress vs custom website development.
Does it need to work in Sinhala, Tamil or English? Multilingual sites need to be planned from the start, because layouts and navigation have to cope with different scripts.
Will you sell online? If so, you are looking at a different project from a brochure site; our e-commerce checklist for Sri Lanka covers payments, delivery and more, and our website development and e-commerce development pages explain how we approach each.
Packages versus a quote for your project
Many agencies advertise website packages. A package fixes the scope, such as a set number of pages and a template design, so the price is easy to state, but it only helps if the package matches what you need. Ask exactly what is included: number of pages, design, languages, content, hosting, support and who owns the site afterwards.
We do not publish packages or fixed prices. We quote each website once we understand what it has to do, and show the breakdown before you commit. The same thinking applies to web design price: it is the layouts, content and features that move it, not the label. Our page on how we price projects explains this in full, and you can tell us about your website to find out what would most affect your quote.
This is how we approach web development projects.
Web Development