Hi guys,

A friend of a friend has asked me to design a website for his electrical contractors business. The website will not be too complicated - basically a site that looks good....displaying information about his business, products and services, a contact page and a couple of flash movies - probably about 15 pages in all

I'm new to all this so was wondering what would be a fair price to charge without ripping him off and without underselling myself also.

I'm happy to do this as it will be good experience for me (I'm a student) but would like to get your opinions on what I should tell him as a cost guideline?

Thanks,

Brian

Normally what works for me : Think about how long it will take, then add on another 33%-50% and then multiply it by your hourly rate.

So a 10 hour job, at €30/hour should cost between €400 - €450.

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You'll also want to take into account Feature Creep ...
Sure the extra little change they want is only going to take 10 minutes ...

10 minutes work .. minute to upload to the site ... another few minutes to write an email to them .. another conversation on the phone about the change ... another little fix to that .. and so on .. suddenly 10 minutes extra work has become an hour.
(Granted its not always like that)

Pauls recommendation of 33-50% extra is something I find myself not doing sometimes and it works out really not worth it in some cases. (me doing the work without the extra 33 - 50% I should say)

Do up a spec of exactly what you're going giving them
Hosting ??? .. how much will it be for them next year ?
Domain name ??? ...
Support during the year ? ... setting up email addresses for them and so on ?
Graphic design ?? (looking at your current site while its functional its not the greatest in terms of design .. sorry to be harsh .. but you are looking at selling a service so it needs to be said)
HTML / CSS coding ?
Custom Coding / scripting ?
Will you be doing anything with SEO ? ... why isn't their site up there at number 1 ? (they'll ask this) .. getting it there isn't a matter of just dumping in the correct title on pages and a few meta tags. Its actually a LOT of work.


Here is a post I made over on boards with some sample figures thrown in for ease it was related to an IT support / Nixer thing so it might apply to you here as well for your other "work" you're doing on the side ..

boards.ie - View Single Post - Fixing computers on the side

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Thanks for that guys....will come up with something based on that!

Point taken about the design on the site Forbairt - tbh I am not really selling that much. I do a bit of work on the side of my college work mostly nixers for friends and friends of friends just to get experience as much as earn money....the website I have set up is to gain experience of seo and attempt to master google and not really to get outside clients. But your point is fair and I will give it a professional look when i get a chance.

Thanks,

Brian

if design isn't your strong point .. then you can potentially find someone to do a design for you .. there is a barter forum on here ... but that'd depend on your skill set ...

Also .. if you were to charge 400 quid for a website for someone else ... you could look at various sites and getting a custom template done up for your site ...

you have to spend a bit on marketing yourself ... and well your website is potentially your biggest marketing tool when it comes to web design (though word of mouth could be good as well if you do a good job)

This crops up on message boards all the time and they're very much 'how long is a piece of string'-type questions! Some Web designers aren't worth minimum wage considering the dog's dinner they make of websites (they can actually *lose* a company business) and some designers can command over €100 per hour.

I would say that if you don't really have much experience then a nominal fee to tide yourself over until you have a portfolio of strong and improving work should do.

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