Pricing

[magicpatrick]

hi,
I'm sure this has been answered in the past so I'm sorry in advance.
How you guys price?
Is there a fee per hour worked on the website? Do you add extra for flash design, javascript, search engine submission...
Or is it all part of the design?

To give you an idea, I just designed a website for a company.
There are: - 13 pages
- Two flash headers
- A javascript menu
- I designed 8 logos so they could choose 1 out of them.
- I submitted the website to all the main search engines.
Unfortunately I could not tell you how many hours I spent on it but approximatively 30 hours I believe.

So could you tell me how would you go about pricing it and how much you would have priced it yourself.

Thank you,
Patrick

 

[tony84]

i would say a fair price would be around $15 an hour?
but it depends on your experience skills etc
you could easily charge double that if you can make amazing sites

 

[will7]

Pricing. What an issue! It depends on a number of factors:

• Experience
• Skill
• Site Content

Experience:
If you have a vast portfolio with lots of high-class, high-quality work, then fine, you can charge high. But, if you are just starting out, it is probably a better idea to price low.

Now, I'm not saying you have to, but you might get more work. Fair enough, once you have 20 quality sites, then you can start charging $30k for a 12-page site(*cough* Ceonex *cough*).

Most of the time, people aren't bothered about qualifications. It's like, "Can you do the job", "Well, I have a degree in this, that and the other". That's no help because it doesn't answe the question. You say, "Yes, of course I can! Look at these sites, I created them all, that's an example of the quality I provide" then it creates a much better impression!

Skill:
It stands to follow, if you have a high skill level, then you can charge high prices. If all you know is Frontpage then don't expect to charge anymore than £300 (and that's pushing it).

But, if you have extensive knowledge of Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Xara etc and are fluent in PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML & CSS then you can warrant charging $30k + (supposing you have the portfolio to support it).

Site Content:
This is quite important. If the site is a small, 2-page basic text site, you obviously would not charge £10k for it. But, say it is an E-Commerce site with over 50 pages, a 100-page custom shop and flash then you might charge around the £40 - £50k mark if you were a globally known firm.

So, I hope I've helped you. Wait, one more point.

I would recommend not charging by the hour. Clients prefer to know what they're getting and for what price. Just a straight, flat price and also give them a guarantee that there are no hidden fees - even if you know you won't charge extra, just give them a guarantee anyway, makes the client feel secure (always a good sign!).

That's all. If you need any more information, just give me a PM or post in this thread, the latter being preferred - PM's are pretty far down in priority in my schedule (unless they're PM's to order a logo, of course ).

 

[magicpatrick]

thanks for the reply, it helps a lot. Although I wasnt sure of something, were talking in pounds or dollars? U used both symbols so I kinda got lost.

 

[will7]

All dollar references are to Ceonex (an american web design company). I'm in the UK so all other prices are in pounds.

 

[StudioWorks]

I can't understand this " per hour rate"

You should charge on how much you work, how complex the site in question is, how many pages and so on.

 

[magicpatrick]

yeah I understand that, but it is how you come up with the figures that I find complex. If its a simple html website with a javascript menu, 2 flash header... as i listed above, how would you charge it? I just don't know how to tackle it. And yes, I'm quite new as this will be only the 5th site I get paid for. But the largest by far.

 

[thenoobbuster]

hi

do you have a link im just curious

 

[SickCars]

I would charge something around $20/hr

30hr x 20 = $600

So do something like this, Tell them u usually charge $20/h so it Would cost $600 but you will give them a deal if they recomend u or something like that, SO give it to them for $550 or $500 depending on what u think is good.

 

[Brian]

Pricing in my opinion depends totally on your experience in the field. I tend to give all clients up front prices, sometimes they are a little high for the amount of work needed, and sometimes i get screwed and undercharge. I don't like the whole hourly charge, since it is actually pretty hard to say your oging to work for 4 hours on this, cause I do graphic design when i'm inspired to do so, and i can't make myself get inspired, and i don't want to be charging the client for "searchign for inspiration" time that i spent doing nothing.

 

[StudioWorks]

Yeah I agree Brian.

I never understood this " hourly rate "

 

[FusunMedia]

Quality is key, if you have lots of experience and many high profile clients than $30+/hour is very reasonable. If experience/quality level is average, I would personally charge no more than $15/hour. I consider experienced as very knowledgable in XHTML, CSS, Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator. If your able to create tableless CSS layouts with ease in conjunction with the other programs, than that's VERY experienced in my opinion.