The easy answer is you don’t have to worry about Responsive Website Development Costs …. You can go ahead and have your website developed the “Old Fashioned Way” and ignore the user experience on smartphones and tablets everyone is so feverishly leaning over while waiting in line for their morning triple venti mochachino.  The question you have to ask yourself is,  “What is it worth to provide your visitors with the optimal user experience regardless of their chosen device?”; or “Would you rather save some money on web design costs and have your website’s content not look quite right?”

Responsive Web Design vs. Dedicated Website

Dedicated Website:  A dedicated website is the “old fashioned” site we discussed earlier, granted, it is certainly easier and less expensive to develop than a Responsive Web Design Site. The problem is that it is formatted to a standard web browser on a computer and although it may look amazing on a computer, access it from your smartphone and it’s a mess.

Responsive Web Design: Websites that are developed with a responsive theme are specifically created for an optimal user experience.  Reading and navigation should occur with a minimum amount of difficulty.  The user experience is created from the ground up specifically for a small screen size.

Responsive Website Development Costs Breakdown:

To give some generalities about price (since not all websites are created equally):

Using a mid tier development approach, it will cost around $60-$90 per hour to create a nice looking dedicated website…a few bells and whistles…all told this will cost about $1600 – $2500.

Responsive Web Design Costs will lighten your wallet about 40% – 60% more than building a dedicated website  (outlined above).  Now this is where things get interesting… Once you have decided that you want your dedicated website to be seen properly on mobile devices, you are looking at about 10-16 hours of a developer’s time to create the proper mobile experience (and this is for a general brochure type basic website).  So at $60 – $90 an hour you are now looking at an additional expenditure of … call it $600 – $1500.  Only you can decide if a better user experience is worth that much.

So, the not so easy answer is: Although responsive web design may cost 25%-35% more at the inception of your website presence, in the long run it can be more cost efficient (from a marketing perspective) and much more pleasant to view over your morning coffee.