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I need to have some competitive rates so I can give a quote to my first customer (for web pages anyway). What do you normally charge for a website? Do you do it by montly maintenance charge, per page, per hour, etc. and what rate? Thanks a bunch everyone.
What kind of website are you designing? Is it dynamic or static? How much is the hosting? Will you be re-using any code? What is the expected traffic for the site?
it's for the local branch of a gov't agency that houses several departments (big brothers big sisters and a few others).
It will be mostly static, there will probably be a news section for each dept. that will have to be dynamic though.
Their current hosting is like $20 a month, however the bandwidth demands will be quite low so I was considering hosting it myself but that's just a thought so far
and fyi I'm expecting 20 or so pages for the whole site...minus pages that are just scripts (sending mail, etc.).
That's the kind of stuff I'm looking to get into at first. The exact stuff. I have a few possible clients and we're looking at news scripts, form and information e-mailers, a lot which to have be made by me(cept maybe the news script, though I could fashion a universal one for customers sometime).
Among a generally slick looking static layout using some pleasant photoshop work. I have a few possible clients in the works looking for websites like these.
My hosting service will host them -- http://Bookmarkhosting.com
ive only ever done a few, and it was basically they bought hosting, had an idea what they wanted, and i built it and got it running on their hosting. All repair/upgrade was on others, that was my sole inclusion. My fee was cheap because i needed money, it was around 50 USD for under ten pages and 100 for anything over 10.
Are you sure you want to host it yourself? What type of internet connection do you have? If the power goes out, the server will go down, whereas most hosting companies have redundand generators. That could cause some problems. Right now I'm working for a web design company. We charge a flat monthly rate + hosting fees. Almost all of our code is re-usable, but for any new modules a customer wants, we come up with a time estimate to create the module, and then charge them an hourly rate based on our time estimate.
In your case, I would probably charge an inital fee to create all of the pages based on a time estimate, and then a recurring monthly fee for site maintainance (things such as updating information on static pages, etc.), along with the hosting charges.
And just for the heck of it, here's a website that we launched last Tuesday: http://www.koolfm.com/. It's our highest traffic site by far. 2500 people have signed up so far, and we've already had 136k hits (excluding images) and used 2.61gb of bandwidth. And none of that is including the live radio feed we also host for them.
Yeah, for RoD and the small time people doing everything by themselves, I'd be interested in seeing the products you made for the people.
i did around 5, 90% of them were using postnuke as per their request. I dont have links, i just installed em. I could see if i can contact any of them but its not high on my to do list at the moment.
>>Are you sure you want to host it yourself?
not yet, but it was just a thought. I'm going to be getting 7mb/s wireless from a provider here so that I can remote administrate for that company (I'm the network admin for the whole building, but a couple of dept.'s independantly wanted me to do their site). Our house has a gas generator because when my parents first moved here the power went out constantly so they got on comed's ass and were able to procure the generator. so it's a possibility, and it keeps me from dealing with their hosting company (who refuse to install php). But like I said it's just a thought... what does your company charge for those modules anyway?
Hook them up with www.fissionhost.net
I have several of my customers hosted through there and it is more than sufficent and extremely cheap at $5/mo. Hell, even the $10/mo is very reasonable, and they're great people.
If you did 5 sites and 90% of them were postnuke then one site would have been only half a postnuke install, and what's the point in that?Quote:
i did around 5, 90% of them were using postnuke as per their request. I dont have links, i just installed em. I could see if i can contact any of them but its not high on my to do list at the moment.
Determining how much to charge is a very challenging task for web development. There are many factors to take into account. Typically charging by the page doesn't really work well. I myself charge by the hour, and I have over time developed my own estimation guide to determine total hours billing. Different services hold different demands. Will the site need to maintain a database? Do they have the database already available? Will you have to design a custom database? Will they be providing literature? Have they provided all the images for the site or will you have to provide some graphics design work? Will you be maintaining the site after initial design? Or offer tech support services after their local geek breaks it by trying to improve upon your work (that's a typical service that happens all too often). There are many many more factors you will learn over time.
And a really big factor...how fast do they want it?
You will also probably want to make sure you have a decent contract or service agreement which clearly outlines pricing, proprietary information, services etc... You can find examples and a plethora of other help and advice at http://www.webmasterworld.com/. A very good link for new web developers.
1and1Quote:
Originally Posted by ober
Didn't read the entire post, but in my experience I designed a website for some remax realtors with a set price of $800, which IMO was a very bad idea on my part. I predicted the site only taking about 2 or 3 weeks, but then found out that they wanted me to design an entire database encapsulating all of MLS.ca's condo database, along with designing a streamlined database that ran alongside the other one. Now the site's gone on for about 3 or 4 months and still being tweaked, and I'm still only getting payed $800, which is a load of bull**** and I'm going to be asking them for an extra amount for all of the extras.
-edit-
Moral of this story:
Unless you have the site explicitly layed out in front of you at the time of accepting the work, do NOT give a set price, go for an hourly rate.
I charged a total of around $1100 for http://www.lumberspecialties.com by the time we were done, he wanted to keep adding stuff and etc.
>>I charged a total of around $1100
you should've charged extra and taken a nice picture for them...that pic on the main page is hideous
yah well, the place doesn't look much better than that, what can ya do.
You're one of those "I don't believe in padding" kind of people, huh? ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by B0bDole
You're kidding me, right? You don't even get a mysql database or PHP support for the base option. And such limited options. You get a boatload with fissionhost for just $5/mo.Quote:
Originally Posted by major_small
no, but you get 2x the amount of space and 5x as much transfer... and you can always use PERL...Quote:
Originally Posted by ober
their next plan up ($10) has PHP and a MySQL database... it all depends on what you need.
Ok, but seriously. Tell me someone (personal or even small to mid-size business) that has a real website that uses more than 500mb and 5Gig of transfer/mo.
Hell, I host files for FD members and I'm still well under a gig and I've never gone over 2gig/mo. in transfer. And I look at stats for other companies that I work for. Even mid-size companies don't go over 5 gig/mo. in transfer and don't use 500mb in webspace.
I'm just saying, get more bang for your buck.
Well I was notified this morning that we're holding off on the project until the people can get their acts together. I was notified by the director that the heads of these dept.s were actually weeks behind in work and were only worrying about the website so they could procrastinate some more. One of them was fired, the other was docked pay. So she said in a couple of weeks she'd ask me to make my presentation to her higherups (some sort of financial committee at the district level, higher than the county). So I'm just going to throw some of the existing pics on their site into my template and call it good. I plan to charge them $450 with a $40 monthly maintenance fee and a $30 an hour emergency rate. We haven't decided on hosting yet, we'll see where that takes us over the next couple of weeks.