Web Design Pricing

jjmax

Cheers Altheus,

Pardon the pun, but the advice you've given is priceless!
At the end of they day, besides getting dark, if your happy with the money you're getting and the clients happy to pay, and you can honestly say you're not ripping them off, then there's no problem.
There are a lot of people overcharging.
Likewise there are a lot of people undercharging.
I think both are equally big problems.

heggie

havnt read all the thread so excuse me if its already been said, sure you'll get people saying i could do that in x amount of hours, but could they do it 3 or 4 times in x amount of hours? clients are not gonna jump on the first thing you create and be satisfied. You need to allow for ALL the changes, reverts, changes, and more changes in your pricing.

The Corinthian

Altheus wrote:

I'm not sure where people are pulling their facts from.

I’m not certain where you are, TBH.

I charge considerably more than €7.65 an hour for designing a site, however I still charge within reason. Personally I have a portfolio, experience as well as excellent references from top-level staff at three major international brands. Sites I have worked on have cost upwards of €150,000 all in all, but my own personal work would cost a lot less.

Bully for you. Get in line.

If you look at the designers of that site, webtrade.ie. They've got a long list of awards, testimonials, respectable clients, as well as the resources to manage any job that gets thrown at them. My best guess price for Solicitor.net based on those fact, would somewhere in the region of €2,500 +

Double that figure.

For me it comes down to this, if you're starting out at design, keep the price low at the beginning and the standard of work high, steadily increasing the price from job-to-job, say 50 cent per hour per job. Word of mouth will spread, and before long you'll have a portfolio of work, and hopefully a steady stream of jobs. With some good luck and if you're good enough you'll soon be confidently charging upwards of €1500 per job, with a list of extremely happy clients and references.

Doesn’t work that way. Much of the work any freelancer or business gets is repeat business, and repeat business does not take kindly to increases of “50 cent per hour per job”.

He may have been a good salesman, but he was a poor businessman, as we lost out on a huge amount of business from subsidiary sites and auxillary work.

Speculative. Which returns us to the increases of “50 cent per hour per job” dilemma. He could have taken a hit on the original job in lieu of “ a huge amount of business from subsidiary sites and auxiliary work”, but this assumes that the follow up work would have been worth it. Of course this is also a speculative scenario, but one that I’ve seen many times in the past.

Between 2001 and 2003 there were a lot of WebDev firms essentially having fire sales, simply to keep afloat. Ultimately they were desperate for the cash flow, so as to meet their payroll commitments at the end of the month, but in the long term they were doomed to failure. Projects dragged on and firms were locked in contracts that meant were loosing them money, repeat business was inevitably also under priced too, and eventually, the firms went bust.

If your figure of €1k+ includes hosting and any backend programming you're certainly on the right track. The key though is to make sure you know exactly what you are charging for everything, so when it comes around to raising the prices, you won't have to hide the books.

Based upon your 65 hr estimate, even if you ignore hosting and any backend programming you’re still talking about a rate of €15 p.hr., which is pretty derisory for skilled work. And regardless of what you may think, it is still skilled work - even if the developer / designer is inexperienced, if they can do the job, then that implies that they are skilled, after all.

I’ll be honest, I don’t disagree with all you’re saying, but you wouldn’t make a living out of it. I’ve met way too many freelancers who enter the market with similar notions of value for money only to give up the ghost after a year because they’re earning less than they would in McDonalds.

And, given this, I’d have to question whether it is you rather than your boss who’s the poor businessman.

tomED

The Corinthian wrote:

Double that figure.

I can tell you for a fact - you can more than double it..... say no more....

jjmax

Going a little off-topic here.
But what do people think of that site - www.solicitor.net
I like it, nice and simple and leaves you in little doubt of what the site is for.
I'm not mad about the navigation bar colour, but my eyes are tired now.
And (shock horror) the text doesn't resize in IE!
Someone slipped there, but it does resize nicely in Firefox.
On that, how many are shocked it cost at least 5/6K (possibly lots more)?

mneylon

jjmax - put it in perspective.

If your website is one of your marketing tools then its cost should be relative to your overall spend on marketing etc., and this should all be taken in the context of how much it will actually earn you, or potentially lose you.

clearz

jjmax wrote:

Going a little off-topic here.
But what do people think of that site - www.solicitor.net
I like it, nice and simple and leaves you in little doubt of what the site is for.
I'm not mad about the navigation bar colour, but my eyes are tired now.
And (shock horror) the text doesn't resize in IE!
Someone slipped there, but it does resize nicely in Firefox.
On that, how many are shocked it cost at least 5/6K (possibly lots more)?

The blood red menu burns my retinas. I would tone that down a bit.
Javascript/image rollovers for menu when CSS/Text would have worked far better here.
The front page is nowhere near XHTML-Transitional complient (74 Errors)

Way to much Information under Tallaght court(I know this is hard to avoid ) on the front page. Just the headings as links would do here.