Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

I'm often asked what it costs to do a great web design. The answer is: "It depends. But it's important to figure out what you're about to get into."

Before you can start a "four Ds" process for a web design project (Discover, Design, Develop, and Deploy as described in our Web Design Methodology), there are actually two "Bs" you need to consider first: Budget, and Background Research.  Since budget is the most important thing to get squared away early, here are some tips...

As with all other kinds of development, the cost and time depends on the scope of the project, and you should have well disciplined project management to keep on top of things. It's important to follow a design process so you don't end up spinning or doing a lot of rework.

How long should a design project take? 

At Sun, we do many small design projects in a matter of hours or a day, performing many of the steps in our Web Design Methodology (below) mentally and verbally rather than creating a lot of documents. "Small" in our thinking is defined as a project for which there is some kind of existing template or component set we can use, and ready content, and no engineering required. We're fortunate to have a couple of people on staff who can do the visual design and information architecture.

Larger projects can range from weeks to months; the time it depends on the size of the work, the amount of existing research you can rely on, and other factors. But here are some rough guidelines, assuming that you understand project requirements and have done initial customer research:

• The design phase for a large subsite (~1000 pages with, say, 12+ templates) can take 2-3 months.
• Medium-sized projects an be done in a few weeks to a month, depending on complexity.
• Major application redesigns can require 4-6 months or more. If you are designing something from scratch rather than extending an established design system, expect to need more time
• If you don't have adequate VOC research, expect to spend an additional 1-3 months on data collection and "critical to quality" definition, for bigger projects. (I'll have a posting about doing Background Research soon.)

How much will it cost?

Excluding customer research, medium-sized design projects of a subsite in the U.S. typically cost $30,000-$100,000. Larger projects tend to cost $100,000-$250,000, and very large projects (such as redesign of a large site or constellation of sites) can actually cost $300,000-$500,000 or more, but for that price will include a comprehensive component and information architecture (IA) system like the one we developed for sun.com. Design vendors usually charge according to the number of page types and components they need to design, plus the amount of time they spend on initial scoping and 'discovery', so the more you can have your plans in place and know the size of your project, the better off you are. If you're having design work outside of major metro areas in the U.S., you may be able to get a better deal... but keep in mind that you often get what you pay for. And you'll want your design agency at least within flying distance so you can interact with them at least a few times over the course of the project.

If all of this of this sounds expensive... well.. it is. But consider the cost of engineering (and re-engineering and re-re-engineering) projects because you started off with an incomplete design and have to rework once the launch is live and customers have problems with it or the design system doesn't scale to new business requirements.

By the way, the best investment you can make in design is to develop a component system and master IA, so you don't have to reinvent components and templates each time, and so that you can ensure branded consistency across your pages and subsites. This will be more expensive up front, but will give you a foundation on which to do a lot more future work yourself.

Another thing to keep in mind is that  deployment of new designs can cost as much as three or four times the price of the designs themselves, so always factor that into your estimates for a major redesign.

Ahead: Segmentation and basic background research