Good web design doesn't come cheap. While you can always use a ready-made template, chances are your website isn't going to reach its goals, if you overlook the needs of your potential customers. There are many reasons why building a website comes at such high prices. Here are a few of them.

First of all, the web design should respond to a need most visitors of your websites have. They choose to visit your pages for a reason, which can be anything from wanting an answer to a question to finding a solution to a problem or purchasing a product or a service they are currently seeking for. If your web design is difficult to navigate, many of these visitors will close the page or click the back button in their browser within seconds. Once you lose them, they may never come back again. A clever web designer knows how to make use of the best screen real estate to help these people find what they are looking for. This kind of knowledge comes with time, so you'll want to hire an experienced web designer to handle your website. As you can easily imagine, experience comes at a high price.

The other reason of the high cost of web design is the need for extensive testing of the various elements on the page. Sometimes, the simple changing of a colour can lead to unexpected results, as this apparently minor tweak triggers the visitors of a website to perform a certain action such as to add something to their shopping basket or to join a mailing list.

When it comes to web design, everything matters. You must test colours, typefaces and hero modules. You must also play around with different placements for your most important messages and calls to action. All these take time, hence the relatively high price of web design. Nevertheless, launching a new website without testing it may lead to poor performance and even to a major failure to attain your marketing objectives.

It's also worth mentioning here that web design tools are also expensive. Professionals use top notch software programs they pay a lot for. As you can easily imagine, they have to include these costs in their hourly rates, in order to be profitable. Like everyone else, they have to run their businesses for profit, so they can't lower their prices beyond a certain threshold. Furthermore, many of them invest huge amounts of money in training courses to be able to use those programs to the full. Education is also expensive and it reflects in the prices of web design services.

Al these being said, you should know that there are always cheap services available. However, before choosing the cheapest web designer you come across, you should understand that more often than not you get exactly what you pay for. These cheaper freelancers may not use the best software tools and may not be aware of the latest best practices in web design, so their work may be of lower quality.