how much to charge

[trukkerz]

hi guys I have just done a website for a friend and I was wondering what everybody charges - I am no expert but I think its turned out quite good and the hotel owners love it so could you have a look and give me any pointers on price to charge - its still in progress so a couple of the pages are a bit empty

Thanks Again

http://www.watersedgehotel-blackpool.co.uk

I am going to host if free for the 1st 6 months and I am a bit stuck as to what to charge to maintain it as I cant make it so they could update it themselves for obvious reasons

thanks

[sjukmidlands]

Hi - well done on getting your first website commission.

I build websites professionally, so what I'd suggest is work out a structure on how much you'd like to get for a site based on its size/how long it takes to build. I know it is complicated by being built for a friend, but you still have to apply that ethic. Smallish websites like this I usually charge a few hundred pounds, anything from a couple of hundred to several.

Are you hosting it on your own server or have you set it up with a hosting company, e.g. Fasthosts or 1&1 ? I usually pass on or initially set the hosting and domain for the client to manage themselves, but then charge the client for any updates I do in the future for maintenance, for instance maybe twenty pounds for a simple page update some date in the future. If it's a site needing upgrading regularly, for instance a website I built and look after for a garden centre has monthly updates and of course seasonal ones too so they pay me a quarterly fee.

I hope this helps.

Good luck!

Steve

[trukkerz]

hi thanks for the reply - yes it is difficult especially being a friend plus I am not experienced in HTML or coding of any type - but I suppose my friend doesnt know how easy xara is to use - I feel like i am ripping her off if i charge too much but then I am being told by other friends that I have to charge a good going rate

I will be hosting it on a server run by a company called x9internet - I bought a hosting package which I can host 50 domains and I only paid about £2.50 and it says my billing period is yearly so I dont know wether they made a mistake or what :-)

Yes I do think this will be a regular update - she asked me yesterday if I could show a calendar to show rooms that are booked and she would email which rooms are booked for what days - Cant think of an easy way to do it - any suggestions

anyway thanks for you input

Trukkerz

[ChrisBro]

Hello

As already said well done on creating your first site

OK home truth time..................................

Dont make the mistake many people do and start charging the earth for what is by far not a professional site, dont get me wrong I am not poking at your work but it is quite clear you are "new" to this kind of design work so that must be reflected in the price you charge, also worth noting that your client will also be friends with other businesses in the Blackpool area a word of mouth reccomend is priceless, in fact around 70% of my new work come from existing clients reccomending me to their friends, if you charge a small fortune that is not going to happen.

At the end of the day you are not a professional designer and at the moment are not achieving professional results so forget all about the several hundreds of pounds you are just going to end up with a disgruntled client who is also a friend and then when other design companies decide to do a cold call sales sting as they frequently do in places like Blcakpool they are also going to poke holes and point out problems which will not reflect well on you if you have charged a lot of money for the initial design.

Dont get me wrong you have done well for a first effort, it is functional, friendly and gets the message across well, you have not done any SEO work however, a site that is not indexed in a search engine with a decent ranking may as well not be there, you have said it s a work in progress so am sure you will turn your attention to this.

In all honesty if I was you, if they are good friends I would offer it as a freebie on the condition they pass on decent word of mout reccomendations for you, if they are not so good friends and you want to make some money if I was you I would look at charging say £100 and then I charge my clients £10 a month for hosting, sure they can get it a lot cheaper elsewhere but then they dont have me to deal with hosting problems and downtime In all honesty none of them have ever questioned my hosting fee without blowing my own trumpet they have no need to I am a one man band but they have access to me 24/7 and I offer fantastic support, most of them dont even know how to log into their cpanel and have no wish to know lol.

So far as updates again it depends on what the update is, I can only tell you what I do but bear in mind I am into my 4th year now and have experience of Dreamweaver and raw HTML (to a certain extent ) I use Xara now for smaller, simpler sites as in the long run it save a lot of time, I will deign my clients a 5 page site for £150 very cheaply, its the hook to get them then £10 per month for hosting, some people charge by the page for updates I charge £25 per hour spent updating anything and I am over generous with this time as well, the most imprtant thing is your client feels some kind of value.

Hope that helps, you have made the same mistake I did BTW get your own site finished quickly!!!! I did this my own site never took any priority and I had all these backlinks from index pages of clients sites to an absolute crappy site of my own lol, it is stll very much a work in progress but is now fully automated and functional, if you are running your own server you could do with a billing manager by far the best is WHMCSdotcom if you get the license through licensepal you get it for around $12 a month, setup correctly it fully automates your business well the hosting side anyhow.

You dont need a dedicated server to begin with but for sake of providing "quality" hosting I would at the very least look at purchasing your own VPS server, whatever you do stay away from reseller accounts.............................

All the best and again well done

Chris

[trukkerz]

thanks chris I appreciate all your points and I i must admit all that you have said is practically what I was thinking - She is a friend but not a close friend - I was thinking around the £100 mark because like you say I am no expert and as you say I will have to sort the seo and getting it onto the search engines

Thanks again for your time

Trukkerz

[ChrisBro]

Hi Trukkerz

No problem glad I could be of help

all the best

Chris

[Cloud]

Hi!

I charge around the £100 mark for a 3pager and £150 for 5 pages with a form, seo, google analytics etc. Once a have a good portfolio of work I will think about raising this slightly, but for now to get that good portfolio you have to keep your prices low.

by the way chris, at the moment my clients arrange their hosting themselves, usually 123-reg. I was thinking of going with a reseller account with probably heart internet. why do you think that reseller accounts are a bad idea.

[gwpriester]

Maybe you could arrange a barter. A few nights stay in the presidential suite in exchange for the site.

But the basic rule #1 is, do not do any work, at all, until you and your client have reached an agreement. Some people actually think you are just doing the site as a favor and do not expect anything. If you turn up at the end of the job they may not be very happy. In the case of a friend, it could put a crimp on the friendship.

Treat web design as your would any business.

As for a rule of thumb, how much do you think your time is worth per hour. And how many hours did you spend on the job? This is what the job is worth.

[jon404]

Had my own design business for twelve years, and learned to charge the most I could for any job, based on the relative opulence of my clients' offices. Rug thickness, number of secretaries. Also learned that you make the most money when there's a tight deadline and they can't make meaningless changes. You can bill for changes, but the time spent on them keeps you from making real money. Learned to never give more than three choices for any design and, better, to give no choices at all. Learned to sell to the person who could write a check, not to an underling. And to be very careful selling to universities or other big institutions who are very slow paying. Magic phrase: "Let's hand-walk my bill through your accounting department." And get half up front before you start, then half on delivery or withing 14 days after delivery.
What to charge? As much as you can get. Certainly the same per hour as an electrician or plumber. But price per job, not per hour. Sell to people with lots of money; avoid those without. Remember an old saying: "If the client proves refractory, add a picture of the factory." Or, if selling to the Saudis, extra pix of a prince or two.

[ChrisBro]

Hi!

I charge around the £100 mark for a 3pager and £150 for 5 pages with a form, seo, google analytics etc. Once a have a good portfolio of work I will think about raising this slightly, but for now to get that good portfolio you have to keep your prices low.

by the way chris, at the moment my clients arrange their hosting themselves, usually 123-reg. I was thinking of going with a reseller account with probably heart internet. why do you think that reseller accounts are a bad idea.

Hello

Heart Internet are a big supplier who on the face of it have a good reputation so you may be OK with them, the main reason to avoid seller accounts is most hosts offer them as merely an afterthought, they tend to reside on over populated, overworked servers and you are at the mercy of a probably over worked tech team but more importantly the "quality" of the other accounts on the same server as yours can have a negative impact on your own.

For instance it is quite rare to get your own dedicated IP address with a reseller account, they tend to be shared by the many accounts located on the same server, the negative with this is if someones else is spamming and you or one of your clients try to send say a newsletter or marketing campaign from the same server the chances are it will only ever see a spam filter on junkbox not a great marketing tactic, or worst still the actual IP's could well be blacklisted then you and your clients are in or a hole world of problems.

The easy way around this is to request your own dedicated IP address or 2 ideally however not all reseller accounts have this facility and with a lot of the 1 man band hosts nowadays you could end up a reseller on a reseller account if you get me

The biggest downside by far though comes again from other peoples accounts and what softwares they are running, if they are a memory of bandwidth hog then this will seriously impact on you and your client accounts, the bigger hosts I should imagine Heart would be included in this will keep an eye on things and suspend offending accounts as and when necessary but again the cheap smaller hosts dont give a dam really.

I'd reccomend a VPS (Virtual Private Sever) as a good starting point also worth noting is this market at the moment is very competative there are some great deals out there, some even cheaper than top line reseller accounts, you need to broaden your knowledge a little to manage the server but most of the time you will have access to a decent tech team which in my experience with a few of the bigger hosts over the last few years tend to provide excellent support when needed.

I run a couple of dedicated boxes and 7 different VPS servers now to evenly spread my clients, 3 of the vps are redundant purely for backup and shadowing something else you need to think about

Hope that helps
Chris