At first glance, Miller's lesson seems like a blend of two clichés: "buyer, beware" and "penny-wise, pound-foolish." But in the world of Web-site design, only the first is always true.

Take the case of John Ahrens. He also spent $3,000 on a site, but he came away pleased. His company, Zetet, a personal-digital-assistant-software developer in Plano, Tex., needed a no-frills Web presence on a start-up budget. He indicated he'd pay $3,000 for a "simple 10- to 15-page site, no E-commerce, no database." An independent designer won the bid and in three weeks produced a site that the Zetet founder calls "crisp and professional."

What does it mean if for $3,000 one customer feels ripped off and another rewarded? It means that when it comes to designing and building Web sites, rates are not the only way to judge vendor quality. In fact, they may be the worst way to gauge it.

Getting What You Pay For
Web-shop owners agree that site pricing generally falls into three broad categories. For the sake of clarity, let's call them "basic," "intermediate," and "complex."

Do you want your site to perform online transactions? And do you want your site to electronically interact with your software systems? If the answer to both questions is no, you most likely need a basic site and should spend anywhere from $500 to $30,000 for the site's initial design (what it looks like) and development (how it works). But if the answer to either is yes, then the price ranges from $2,000 to $3 million, depending on how technologically elaborate and tailor-made you want the site to be. If at most you want your site to perform straightforward online transactions, you're in the intermediate category and should not pay more than $100,000. But if you want your site to electronically pump those transactions into a custom-built, one-of-a-kind accounting system, you're in the complex category, and the sky's the limit on what you might pay.

Ahrens knew that he'd need a basic site: no more than 15 Web pages and little high-tech work. That alone saved him a bundle. Intermediate and complex sites cost more because, among other reasons, they require the labor of software engineers and computer programmers. Because Ahrens didn't want to re-create Amazon.com, that labor wasn't necessary for Zetet.com.

Building an intermediate or complex site engenders different cost concerns. The pricier sites, besides having sophisticated E-commerce features, often have detailed databases that mesh with a company's back-end systems (including inventory, fulfillment, and accounting). As a result, building the sites requires lots of costly technical labor. The precise cost of that labor -- both what the Web shop pays its employees and what it in turn charges its customers -- varies widely not just from Web shop to Web shop but sometimes from client to client.

Money Madness
Among the many factors that influence Web-design rates are region, shop overhead (like rent and employees), and level of service provided. (Some shops offer phone tech support; others offer additional services, such as marketing, public relations, and logo design, to complement Web pages.) There's also a bevy of less tangible factors. Some Web-design outfits lower their prices out of desperation for customers or to add an impressive client to a portfolio. Others raise prices when they think a client might willingly pay a higher fee. Matt Francis, from Marietta, GA, admits that he might quote the same basic project at two different amounts for two different customers. A customer who is likely to stick to a project's initial blueprint usually gets a cheaper quote than a customer who seems likely to request alterations at every stage of the project. Francis gauges a customer's likeliness to amend the project mostly by instinct, based on the customer's seeming skittishness. Depending on how many changes Francis anticipates the customer will make, he can modify his flat fee by hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Francis, Dossett, and several other Web pros all say they have encountered small-business owners who are shocked to learn that professional Web-site building usually costs more than $1,000. They attribute the sticker shock to two factors: first, there is a proliferation of Web-design freelancers and moonlighters who offer their services at bargain prices on job exchanges; second, some huge companies have run ad campaigns claiming they can build a legit Web presence for a low starting cost. Both Dell and IBM, for example, have run offers to build functional small-business sites for less than $500.