How much does it cost to design a catalog?
There are two approaches to catalog design and you should understand the differences to determine what your true costs may be.
Page Layout
This is the most common method and also the most expensive. Our research* finds pricing in the range of $200 to $300 per page for small catalogs, and more than $100 per page for larger catalogs.
With the Page Layout method, every element on every page is placed individually. This allows for complete flexibilty and creativity - anything you can imagine, should be able to be created. However, this can be very time-consuming, especially for larger catalogs, and leads to the higher cost.
* We used the search phrase: "we do not work from pre-made templates" which resulted in nearly 40 sites which are almost word-for-word copies of each other. Try that search yourself (with the quotes) - we think it indicates something about the level of creativity you can expect.
Database-Driven
Pricing starts at under $100** for the do-it-yourself option and rises to more than $600. Our research did not find any sites which sell catalog building software and also show a cost for designing a catalog using their own software. All required that you contact them for a quote and some did not even list the price of the software.
** An important consideration if you are thinking of this option is the templates. At the lower end of the price scale, these applications offer a limited number of pre-defined templates. Your data must be adapted to fit the template - so, there isn't really any design service to offer.
A Better Method
CleverCat is a Hybrid Application combining the design flexibility of page layout and the speed and simplicity of database-driven software.
Instead of laying out every element on a page, we design the page as a container for the Product Layouts. We then design the Layout for a single product (or product group) and let the application create the rest of the pages. So, the cost for designing 100 pages is the same as the cost for a single page. The cost of a catalog of just 20 pages can be thousands of dollars less than the traditional method and the larger the catalog, the greater the savings.
Because CleverCat templates are built from scratch, they can be designed to suit any data - there are no pre-defined templates. We can create as many different templates as your data requires so that each category, or even every page, has a unique look. If you have a previous catalog that you would like to use as a template, send us a PDF, or even a screenshot, and we'll be happy to reproduce it for you.
