Taking into account a three-to-four-year life span, web sites cost anywhere from $10 per month for a self-serve solution from a web hosting company, to thousands per month for a site created by a high-end marketing agency. Most web sites would be done by providers in the middle ground who quote on projects based on hourly fees.

Even within the middle ground, there is also a wide range of prices for very similar web sites. The discrepancies we see in rates here are, in part, due to a wide range of experience, competence levels and egos. Complicating the quoting process is the fact that many people who want to buy a web site are not familiar with the technologies and terminology involved, which means they find it difficult to provide sufficiently detailed specifications to the developers. Different interpretations of requirements can lead to very different quotes.

Think of the words you type into the Google search field to find something on the Internet: those are keywords.

Keywords need to be added to the text of your web site. Your best keywords should be at the top of your home page and should be used often and be emphasized with formatting. Those top keywords should also be in the title tag of your web page. The keyword meta tag is now mostly useless...

The answer to all of these questions is usually no, but let me explain...

It is a common misconception that a redesign (changing the look) will improve a web site's performance. The amount of time and effort you have available to put into your web site is finite. The amount of performance improvement you can gain from making your web site look better is usually minimal.

So provided that your web site is reasonably attractive and does not look too dated, my advice is to first put your time and energy into improving aspects of your web site where the payoff for improvement is higher: things like the text, organization, structure, SEO, etc....