Hi,
this is a site I made for a friend (photographs an all included) for free and just for fun: http://www.amphore.de/.
Now I have been asked several times to create sites like this one for other firms, so I would like to know how much to charge for such a job. Can anyone help me to a realistic estimation?
Thanks in advance!
tok
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Sometime around 25/1/09 (at 08:30 -0500) tok said:
Can anyone help me to a realistic estimation?
How long did it take to make this? How long would it take for you to
make it again now?
Any price estimate should begin with a realistic estimate of the time
it will take to do the project. From there you need to estimate your
minimum hourly rate. At this point you have the figure you should
not go below; work out what sort of margin you want to build in,
and there you go.
So - start with working out how long it will take. And the answer is…?
k
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How long did it take to make this? How long would it take for you to make it again now?
I don’t remember, I am afraid. And – even if I did – would a client care? I was him I’d just appraise the result. But I am not familiar with the business, of course.
Thank you anyway.
tok
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You don’t need to tell the client how much time it will take. You need to tell him how much your time is worth by saying, this is how much the project will cost you. Value your time. Let them decide if the amount you are asking for is worth it to them. If they don’t value your services, they may not be worth having as a client anyway. A client that does not want to pay you much will probably not be worth working with, and will tend to want to squeeze everything they can out of you.
I know that’s a bit of a philosophical answer, but it really is the right way to go about this.
On a more practical note, you could give yourself a range to play with, present the price to the client that you think is right, and be able to negotiate to the lower end if he doesn’t accept it and you think he may bite. But don’t go lower than that.
I’ve found in most cases, business clients simply agree to the quote that I’ve presented. I also found that the more I did it, the more accurate my quotes became. Keep at it and you will learn.
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How right you are! A client is interested in the finished result and
how much he is willing to pay or it. That depends on the size of his
business, his marketing spend and whether or not he has any real idea
of what the job takes - and clients tend to under estimate the last.
However, a good starting point is to think how many different things
you had to do on your original site. Not just the web design in
Freeway, but the gathering of information, any work you did in the
images, etc. Then you can assess the sort of time involved, albeit you
should be a little quicker second time around. Then take the advice
already given from others on this forum.
HTH Colin.
On 25 Jan 2009, at 14:00, tok wrote:
How long did it take to make this? How long would it take for you
to make it again now?… – would a client care? I was him I’d just appraise the result.
But I am not familiar with the business, of course.
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Sometime around 25/1/09 (at 09:00 -0500) tok said:
I don’t remember, I am afraid. And - even if I did - would a client care?
Possibly not, but that isn’t really the reason you do this kind of exercise.
If you think it might take, say, 40 hours to
build another site like the one you did before,
then you can start to work out how much you
should charge. This is only part of the equation
of course; next you need to work out how much you
should fix as your bottom-of-the-line hourly rate.
It doesn’t matter whether you present all the
details of this sort of process to the client or
give them a single figure, this is important
stuff to do.
If you charge less per hour than your basic
income requirements then you are effectively
subsidising the client’s site by giving them some
of your own time. There’s nothing wrong with
doing this… BUT you shouldn’t do it without
deciding to.
As for working out your minimum hourly rate, this
is not quite as hard as it might seem, and
moderately scientific. This applies whether
you’re doing this as your full-time job or you’re
doing it in your free time.
Work out your base-level gross income
requirements. Include everything required to
cover rent/mortgage, transport, food, clothes,
bills, software and hardware, holidays, evenings
at the cinema, income tax (remember this is
gross, pre-tax)… absolutely all you need to
maintain yourself and any dependents in a
reasonable manner.
For the sake of simplicity let’s say this is
£40,000 per year. In reality it may be more or it
may be less; this is just an example that I’ve
used before.
Divide this by the number of billable hours you
can reasonably expect to have IF you did this
full-time. (This process works even if you’re a
salaried employee somewhere because hours taken
for freelance work are hours taken from the rest
of your life, regardless.)
To save you the headache, a reliable (and also
mathematically-convenient) figure for this is
1000 billable hours per year. The other 1000
hours in a typical work-year are typically spent
on non-billable stuff. (Sad but true, trust me!)
So the final equation is this:
(Total required gross annual income)
divided by
(annual billable hours)
equals your minimum hourly rate.
Expressed with the example income requirement above, this is:
£40K / 1000 = £40ph.
Now you need to decide whether you’re going to
build in anything for negotiation room or to
allow for slippage. If you were dealing with a
more specialist area such as server-side
scripting with PHP and MySQL then the norm is to
charge significantly more than the above example
figure, so having worked out your rock-bottom
rate you need to see if you’re undercharging
compared to reputable (I stress reputable)
competitors.
If you think you’re overcharging and you don’t
feel comfortable charging your base-level hourly
rate… then don’t take on the work.
Seriously, if you charge less than you NEED then
you are effectively paying for part of the
client’s site yourself with your time. If you
want to provide your services as a charitable
donation, fine, otherwise Do Not Do This.
(And if you DO donate time in this way make this
known to the client - or you will eventually
regret it as people start taking you for a ride
and walk away the moment you ask for a reasonable
price.)
Finally, I prefer not to talk about hourly rates
if I can help it. I would rather talk about the
cost for a project, or perhaps daily rates if
necessary. But knowing your minimum hourly rate
is helpful when working those things out, of
course.
k
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Keith wrote:
you need to see if you’re undercharging compared to reputable (I stress reputable) competitors.
Yes, check out the going rate for a nice commercial site like this in your country, with your language requirements. Give an estimate based on the completed site, not hourly rate. Don’t forget to inform the client of additional charges for future updates.
Jim
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If you are new to making a website for people and want to build up a portfolio of clients to attract more business. I would say that you might need to compromise a little.
The time it takes you to build a simple but effective website might take ten times as long as a more experience person. If you think that you might get more and more offers of work and this could form the basis of you future income.
I would say look at what you could reasonably ask and how that would fit into the local market place.
I have just finished building my car clubs website, http://www.warwickshire7s.co.uk
I have not charged anything for it and if I had of billed out my time it would never have happened. But I have learnt a lot.
I now plan to replace my photography website which was made in iWeb with one made in freeway 5 Pro. http://www.jamiejonesphoto.com
Again the time I spend doing that, I would no dought be better off getting someone else to do it for me from a cost point of view.
But I am learning as I go along. I, like you, have been asked to build a website for a couple of other peoples small businesses. The problem is that they are friends and they have said that they are willing to pay.
If I charged for my time, I doubt they would part with that amount of cash. lol
But I will do it for a nominal fee. Why? Because it is better to be paid to assist my learning of web building than not.
Once I have built a few websites I will then create a website for building websites for other small businesses and have a portfolio of a small number of websites I have already created. I, and you should then get the people you have built these website for, to do a testimonial for you that you can display in your galleries.
OK you might not make any money on your first few websites, but it will help you justify your costs and create some good marketing on your own sites. If these clients are happy they will also recommend you to others. It is all a bit Chicken & Egg.
The next thing I would suggest is that when you fix a price, you also discuss a small retainer for managing the website, updating it, consultations on improvements. ect.
This way you will retain a client base and secure future work. If you are improving and updating a former clients website they are less likely to get someone else to build them a new site in a year or two. In this time you will have had some extra money for doing refreshes and so the seeds of complete rebuilds further down the road as your knowledge and experience builds up, by suggesting stuff you know you can do.
Just my thoughts,
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…further down the road as your knowledge and experience builds up…
This is good advice but Tok’s website is actually very nicely designed and professionally functional- not the usual first-timer’s effort.
I might add that it’s better than some professionally designed sites I’ve seen 
Jim
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Thank you all for your answers! They won’t really help me, though. As I said, webdesign used to be just fun for me; I’ve been a professional pop song writer for 30 years and the idea of calculating an hourly rate sounds extremely strange to me. The money a pop song brings in ranges between „a lot“ and „nothing“. Websites seem to be just as appraisable, it seems …
tok
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the idea of calculating an hourly rate sounds extremely strange to me
Fair enough! You can choose to work however you like. However, this
IS the best way to arrive at that realistic estimation of how much to
charge.
If the hourly rate seems particularly uncomfortable, perhaps a day
rate would be easier? Divide your annual income needs by 180. It just
isn’t quite as drop-dead simple as dividing by 1000. 
Even in the music industry, when it comes to the people handling the
filthy lucre, the idea of a bottom line, costs and minimum fees is
not alien. This is nothing more than a quick way to figure out a
fair amount to ask for.
Finally, web design should be fun. It is for me too. But one way to
ensure that it remains fun is to make sure you don’t find yourself in
an imbalanced work/reward situation that starts to make you feel
resentful. Another way is to turn down all but the occasional project
and do those purely for the love of it or for token amounts. It is
entirely your call!
k
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This is like the ‘how long is a piece of string’ question! After struggling to find the secret formula, I gave up and did a quick guesstimate, usually on the back of an envelope—so many pictures plus so many pages plus so many hand-drawn items, etc equals …. In other words I guessed!
You can, of course, do everything ‘properly’. Decide on an hourly charge that covers your working expenses—rent, electricity, fuel, etc—and make an official printed estimate or quotation on headed paper. How much you charge can also depend on who you’re working for; a small operation or one-man band can be more challenging than a big company, for example. Small companies will often pay you when you deliver the job, sometimes in cash. With big companies, you might have to wait several weeks for your first payment, but you can charge a bit more.
There are no rules. Think of a number—so much per page, job or hour—and see how things work out.
I know what you mean when you talk about fun. If web or graphic design ceases to be pleasurable, give it up and do something else.
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Sometime around 26/1/09 (at 07:23 -0500) IanB said:
You can, of course, do everything ‘properly’. Decide on an hourly
charge that covers your working expenses-rent, electricity, fuel,
etc-and make an official printed estimate or quotation on headed
paper.
If you do this once - just once and just for yourself - then
subsequent top-of-the-head guesses will generally be more reliable. I
don’t do the sums any more, I have a reasonable feel for things and
can generally take it from there.
k
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