Question about website design costs

[CrusaderX]

A local civic organization has asked for my help in developing a simple website for them. It won't be anything too fancy, just a fairly basic layout with a nice looking front page, 3 or 4 subpages, and various links, photos, and monthly updated information. I agreed to develop this for them, but I'm not sure what to charge. I don't want to overcharge them, but I don't want to undercharge them, either.

Some quick Googling on professional web developers online came up with the folowing price quotes:

Random company #1 charges $200 - $450 for 1 to 5 pages.

Random company #2 charges $550 - $750 for up to 4 pages.

Random company #3 charges $599 for a starter package, but doesn't really indicate everything included.

Are these prices typical? They seem a bit high to me, but then again, I'm not a professional web developer.

 

[Cergorach]

Make an hour estimate on how much time you'll spend on making the website and multiply that by the amount you'll charge per hour.
Just make sure that you also add the time you'll be spending listening to the wishes of the customer and posibly making changes after your done with the initial design.
Also make sure that the customer is aware of what exactly you'll do and for how long, i've had trouble in the past with folks that wouldn't stop bugging me with questions and requests after i had already finished the project for them (i was to new and to polite to say no at the time).

 

[dvvega]

What you see in the website cost market is a "see how much you can get away with" attitude. The amount of effort involved with all the content management systems out there nowadays is negligible. The most time taken is the initial design/setup of the CMS for the website in question.

Cergorach's advice of deciding what your hourly fee will be first is a good one. You should NEVER openly charge for consultation with the client on the project. What this means is that you should factor it into your hourly rate.

You also need to factor in support (oh I don't really like that colour anymore can you change it). You also need to decide on what is a change, and what is insignificant.

Do not make the mistake of thinking "it's just one colour code". Set out the guidelines for what is a change and what is "free". Because this will end up costing you more time than you thought originally.

For example:

You assume a 2 hour session with the client ... this is a "free" consultation.
You come away thinking it will take you 4 hours to complete.

You want $50 per hour. Your total is 6 hours, so $300.

To them it looks like you're charging $75 per hour.

Now they ask you a total of 10 times to change "something small" for a total of 2 hours work (phone/meeting/actual coding). Each of these you think its a freebie, just want them to be happy and make myself look good.

You've just upped the work load to 8 hours, and gained no extra money, so your rate has dropped to $30-odd an hour. That's below your original desire of $50.


The prices you quoted are pretty much based on a per-page basis with a starting figure to factor in basic time/setup. In the example above you might decide that each page will take you an hour. Additionally you want to cover yourself for a full day (8 hours) work just in case of "requests".

You now have $400 + $50 per page as a starting figure (company 2 seems to be doing it that way).

Company 1 probably factored in only 4 hours extra work or something simialr.