Web Development Services

A marketing site or storefront typically runs $15K to $60K. A custom web application with integrations, roles and reporting usually lands between $60K and $250K. Scope, integrations and compliance move that number far more than page count does. After a free discovery call you get an itemized estimate, with no obligation.

A marketing site typically takes 4 to 8 weeks. A custom web application usually runs 3 to 6 months, and a platform with data migration and security review takes longer. We work in two-week sprints, so you click through working software every two weeks rather than waiting for a reveal at the end.

A web development company typically covers frontend development services, backend and API engineering, full stack web development, e-commerce and CMS builds, performance and accessibility work, and ongoing maintenance. Softaims runs all of it inside one team, so your project never waits on a handoff between two vendors.

Design decides what the site looks like and how a visitor moves through it. Development is the code that makes it work: templates, data, business logic, integrations and deployment. Most schedules slip at the handoff between the two, which is why our designers and engineers sit on the same team.

A website mainly publishes content and asks a visitor to read, browse or fill in a form. A web application is software people log into and work in, with accounts, permissions, saved state and business rules. The tooling overlaps. A web application costs more because the logic and the testing go much deeper.

Use WordPress when a marketing team publishes often and wants to assemble pages without a developer. Go headless with Sanity, Strapi or Contentful when the same content has to feed a site, an app and partner channels, or when speed targets rule out a plugin-heavy theme. Headless costs more to run, so treat it as a decision rather than a default.

Core Web Vitals are three Google metrics: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. They are a ranking signal. More immediately, a slow page loses conversions long before it loses positions.

If you sell to US consumers, to government, or to enterprise buyers, your website almost certainly has to meet a published accessibility standard. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the version the DOJ 2024 ADA Title II rule and most US settlements reference, while Section 508 still points at 2.0 AA. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA, the current version, which extends 2.1. Meeting it as you build costs little. Fixing a finished site after a demand letter costs a great deal, on a deadline you did not choose.

You do, 100%. The repository, the designs, the content and the hosting and domain accounts are yours, assigned in the contract. Nothing is locked inside a proprietary builder, so another team can pick the project up if our engagement ever ends.

Budget 15% to 20% of the build cost per year. Most maintenance retainers are priced in that range, and the money goes on hosting, security patches, framework and plugin upgrades, uptime monitoring, and a small allowance for changes. Sites that skip it drift onto unsupported versions until a rebuild becomes the only option left.