Thread: What price do you charge?

Hey Dave.
I will agree here with your range. For that spec, which is on pretty much the lowest end we usually go, we would charge 5k.

We stopped working on projects less that that about a year ago, although we do take on one or two odd ones that are just in need of some help.

In this industry, you have to educate your client and market the value the website is to them. I have read Brendon Sinclairs Web design business kit from sitepoint and it covers this a lot. There is nothing regarding coding or actual web design in it. It's all about the client side of stuff and charging what you're worth. Perceived value.

The clients that want a 100 page super flash ecommerce store with all the latest ajax bells and whistles and want a 12 month SEO contract signed all for less than 5k are not the clients you want.

Good clients know what they want. Most good clients know they will have to pay for that if they want it done right.

I have seen ripe and they are simply Templatemonster resellers. Their own site is a TM template. In fact, I'm quite sure it is against TM TOS to claim the designs as your own. (I don't know for sure if Ripe are actually doing that).

We have turned down so much business because most people who want a website for less than 5k want more than 10k worth of work and sometimes, it's impossible to get through to them. A lot of our business is actually businesses that come to us after having a design done by sub 5k company that they were not happy with.

As I have said over and over, it's all about educating your potential client. That's one of the reasons YOU have a website.


It's late, I better stop ranting, but there is a good discussion on this over at the enterprise-ireland mailing list.

Originally Posted by davidbehan

Here's a standard spec for a brochure website with about 20 pages, no flash, no database or cms, and all content/logos/photography provided:

Consultancy
Graphic & Website Design
XHTML/CSS Coding
Website Setup
Content Insertion & Formatting
Standard Search Engine Optimisation
Website Hosting

How many man-hours do you think that kind of spec would take? TBH, with no back-end programming or content creation involved I think that paying over €2-4k for something like this would be criminal. (Just in case anyone wonders, I not a designer.)

Let's call a spade a spade - the above is often going to be 2 templates (homepage and content page) and I think the last 2 points in the spec are extraneous. In fairness, I don't know how long it takes to design (that's why I ask about man-hours), but the above spec doesn't even include a modicum of copywriting.

For €5-6k+ I would expect a full CMS (most especially if I'm going to get hammered when I want to add a new product page).

Of course, if you design very innovative and creative front-end then paying a premium for that design is accepted.

Perhaps I'm going too far against the grain here?

Originally Posted by RedCardinal

How many man-hours do you think that kind of spec would take? TBH, with no back-end programming or content creation involved I think that paying over €2-4k for something like this would be criminal. (Just in case anyone wonders, I not a designer.)

Let's call a spade a spade - the above is often going to be 2 templates (homepage and content page) and I think the last 2 points in the spec are extraneous. In fairness, I don't know how long it takes to design (that's why I ask about man-hours), but the above spec doesn't even include a modicum of copywriting.

For €5-6k+ I would expect a full CMS (most especially if I'm going to get hammered when I want to add a new product page).

Of course, if you design very innovative and creative front-end then paying a premium for that design is accepted.

Perhaps I'm going too far against the grain here?

I tend to agree here - brochure sites are a dime a dozen these days, and to pay 2K plus for one, is, well insanity. I would expect to deliver some kind of CMS if the price starts hitting the thousands.

And yes I am a developer - of websites (insert evil laugh)

Lets be realistic here. 1K for something without CMS should be well than enough. It can not take you more than 2-5 days to get something like that together.

Originally Posted by RedCardinal

Let's call a spade a spade - the above is often going to be 2 templates (homepage and content page) and I think the last 2 points in the spec are extraneous.

He's right, 2 templates to be done, and once the customer is happy with that the rest is flower on your ears.

Originally Posted by louie

Lets be realistic here. 1K for something without CMS should be well than enough. It can not take you more than 2-5 days to get something like that together.

I'm afraid I do not agree. Being honest, a really nice website can be done up in photoshop in a day or two, split and exported to HTML and put online. All well and good. But that's not web design or development. So much more has to be done. Accessibility and usability have to be taken into consideration. Have you any idea how difficult it is to get a nice looking site to conform to all three WAI levels, be intuitive, be browser tested, be user tested, be semantically sound and STILL look good?

Clearly not. No offense, but a "brochure" site is not an excuse for cheap workmanship. If you asked a printing company for a hard copy brochure for your business and it was handed to you on poor quality paper, printed off a dot matrix printer and stapled together then you would you feel your 2000 Euro was well spent? Did you really want that in the first place?

See what I'm getting at here?

Originally Posted by redflystudios

Accessibility and usability have to be taken into consideration. Have you any idea how difficult it is to get a nice looking site to conform to all three WAI levels, be intuitive, be browser tested, be user tested, be semantically sound and STILL look good?

I didn't see AAA in the spec Dave? And let's be honest, most designers are not coding to web standards, they're coding to DW/FP standards. As for semantics - very few people even understand the word... (present company excepted of course)

Originally Posted by RedCardinal

I didn't see AAA in the spec Dave? And let's be honest, most designers are not coding to web standards, they're coding to DW/FP standards. As for semantics - very few people even understand the word... (present company excepted of course)

Fair enough, it wasn't in the spec, but shouldn't it be by default? It's not about doing a job to the bare specs, it's about doing it right.

As I mentioned, we have many clients that come FROM other web design companies with some horror stories about how they are treated. It is the web design companys JOB (IMHO) to educate the client.

If you go to buy a car, don't you think you should be told about the dodgy engine or fan belt? Don't you think you should be told that it will break after x miles? (I know we're not talking about a site breaking per se) Just because the car moves, doesn't mean it's worthy to be sold. Even if it is cheap.

It' be different if we were all selling iPods but we're not. And because it's a creative service and not a commodity, then you'll find prices vary hugely.
Also, the profiles of people building sites varies hugely too.

Without talking specifics, we would charge the upper end of those figures for a brochure site. There are people charging more and less in either directionso there really is no set figure.

I've had a blog post in draft for several months. But basically, you'll attract the clients you deserve based on your pricing. Some clients would baulk at paying certain figures while other clients would not spend less than X amount since they would worry that your price did not reflect the importance of their projects.

Originally Posted by EdenWeb

Some clients would baulk at paying certain figures while other clients would not spend less than X amount since they would worry that your price did not reflect the importance of their projects.

I'll have to agree there. That's why I like to meet with all clients rather than do it over email or the phone. You get to find out exactly what category the potential client falls into. As David mentioned in the original post, it's about perceived value.

I prefer to go through EVERYTHING at a meeting with a client and outline why it costs the way it does and be able to justify it. Which I'm not doing a very good job of in this thread)

I guess there will always be DW/FP "Designers". Their market is the budget conscious consumer, ours is the quality conscious who is interested in how their website can help their business.