By Kevin August·5 min read
Search “web design cost spokane” and you get ten pages of “it depends” followed by a contact form. It does depend. But “it depends” is a non-answer, and you can be told exactly what it depends on before you pick up the phone.
That’s what this is, and it starts with the actual numbers. Then the four things that decide where inside them you land, in the order they matter. Work through it and you can size your own project close enough to know whether to call.
The numbers, first
Worth doing plainly, since the paragraph above just criticized everyone who dodges it.
- A landing page or a very small site — one page with one job, or the handful of pages a very small business actually needs — is usually $1,199 to $2,400.
- A business site — ten to thirty pages, with the copy written for you rather than chased out of you — is usually $2,000 to $7,500. This is the common case.
- Larger organizations — thirty to a hundred-plus pages, several locations or audiences, or a genuinely contested category — run $8,000 to $15,000+.
They’re ranges because they have to be. A posted single figure is either so wide it tells you nothing or so narrow it’s wrong for you specifically, and anyone who’d quote you a website off a web page is guessing. Two businesses can ask for the same ten-page site and be a factor of three apart once you know who’s writing the copy and whether an existing site is being migrated.
What a range can’t tell you is where inside it you’d sit. That’s the rest of this piece — and the scopes are broken out here. Then tell us the scope and you’ll have a real number inside one business day, no discovery call required to get it.
What actually moves the number
Four things, in order of how much they matter.
Page count, but not the way you think
Everyone asks “how much per page?” It’s the wrong unit. Ten near-identical service pages are cheaper than four pages that each need their own research, structure, and argument. What costs money is distinct thinking, not distinct URLs.
The honest version of the question is: how many different things does this site have to explain, and how many different people does it have to explain them to?
Whether the copy exists
This is the single biggest swing, and the one most quotes hide.
A quote that assumes you’ll “provide the content” is quietly a much smaller quote. It’s also the number one reason Spokane website projects stall for months — not design, not development. The client owes 4,000 words, and life happens.
If copywriting is included, the price goes up and the project actually ships. If it isn’t, ask what happens to the timeline when the words are late, and get the answer in writing.
Whether anything is being migrated
A brand-new domain is simple. Replacing a site that already ranks is not.
An existing site carries indexed URLs, backlinks, and rankings you’ve already paid for. Moving it means a redirect map, a crawl comparison, and a baseline you can point at afterward when someone asks whether the redesign helped or hurt. That work is real, it takes time, and skipping it is how businesses lose rankings in a redesign — which is common enough that we wrote a separate piece on it.
Whether search was considered before design started
This is where the two-quote pattern comes from.
A site designed without search in mind gets rebuilt — or at minimum heavily rewritten — the moment someone is hired to make it rank. Heading structure, URL structure, internal linking, and page architecture are all decisions made during design, and all of them are expensive to change afterward because changing them means changing the design.
Paying once is cheaper than paying twice. That’s not a sales line; it’s just arithmetic, and it’s the reason this studio exists.
What doesn’t move the number as much as you’d expect
“Custom design” vs. a template. By the time a template is customized enough to not look like a template, you’ve often spent the difference. The real fork isn’t custom-vs-template — it’s whether the structure was decided by your customers’ search behavior or by whatever the demo looked like.
The platform. WordPress, Webflow, and a custom Next.js build all land in similar ranges for similar scope. What differs is what happens after launch — hosting, maintenance, and how much you’re locked in. We’ve written up that comparison separately.
Page speed. Everyone charges for “optimization” as a line item. Budgeting Core Web Vitals during design costs approximately nothing. Retrofitting them onto a finished page-builder site costs a rebuild. Same outcome, wildly different invoice, depending entirely on when it was decided.
The ongoing number
A website is not a one-time purchase, and any quote that implies otherwise is leaving something out.
Expect a monthly figure for hosting, updates, backups, and small changes. Ours is month-to-month with no contract, because a maintenance plan you can’t leave isn’t a service, it’s a hostage situation.
Separately: if you want the site to actually rank, that’s ongoing work too. Every build we ship leaves with a ranking plan attached. You can run it yourself — plenty of clients do — or hand it to the SEO practice next door. Either way you own it, and either way you should know it’s a real cost rather than something that happens by itself after launch.
What to ask any Spokane web designer
Four questions. The answers tell you more than a portfolio will.
- Who writes the copy, and what happens to the timeline if it’s late?
- Do I own the code and can I take it elsewhere? (“Yes, but it only runs on our hosting” is a no.)
- What’s the plan for my existing URLs and rankings? If they don’t ask what you currently rank for, they’re not planning to protect it.
- What’s the Core Web Vitals target, and when do you measure it? “After launch” means never.
Where we land
A range is only worth printing if a real number follows it quickly, so: the quote form takes about two minutes and asks the four questions above in reverse. You’ll get a real number inside one business day, or the two or three questions standing between us and one.
And if your budget and the work don’t meet, you’ll hear that on the first reply rather than the third. That’s the whole reason the form asks for a range — a mismatch is a ten-second answer, and wasting your afternoon to find it out is nobody’s idea of service. Nobody should have to sit through a call to learn they were never in the right room.
Or skip all of it and call — 509-309-0900.
