How much would you charge for a website?

rgrebby

rgrebby

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Name
Richard
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Yes
Someone needs a simple website to show of their bed and breakfast.
Nothing all that impressive, just something simple and to the point with the following parts to it.
Some details can be used from their current website.


About the place
Location
Contact details
nearby attractions
prices
photographs of the building, rooms etc

The price would include hosting and subscriptions for a year
 
How long do you think it will take you to do? How much do you want to earn per hour? Multiply them together.

For hosting etc work out how much it will cost you, then add how much you want to make from it...
 
For £800 I'd want an all singing, all dancing Flash site! I may well be wrong, but I just can't see a B&B paying out that much for a simple website. Especially in the current economic climate. I suppose you could try asking on a web design forum, but you might incur the wrath of 'pro' designers :D
 
There's kids in bedroom's that'll put together a website for clients like this in exchange for a tube of spot cream and a bottle of vodka.
 
It depends on how good you are to be honest. If you value the work you do and feel it justifies the price then fair enough. If people don't appreciate that then I wouldn't do work for them.

The current economic climate is no excuse to lower your prices. Value your work, persuade the client that what they are getting is a long term investment and you won't have a problem. Unfortunately some people will turn around and say they can get a site for £200. Let them go.
 
TimSandhu said:
For £800 I'd want an all singing, all dancing Flash site! I may well be wrong, but I just can't see a B&B paying out that much for a simple website. Especially in the current economic climate. I suppose you could try asking on a web design forum, but you might incur the wrath of 'pro' designers :D
Click to expand...

Im in business - the B&B is in business, and thats what it costs.. And thats why a B&B owner will understand my pricing

Considering a single yellow pages add cost me double that, and A google adwords campagn could cost many times that a year - I would say that is good value. You also need to consider... The kid in the bedroom isnt paying tax and NI - I am... £800.00 less tax and NI is about £520.00

For this money I would spend a week solid (or more) delivering a website that drives business through the customers door - I would not use flash, as that will be the worst technology paltform for this type of customer. The work i do then includes subsequent work with SEO and google analytics afterwards. I spend time understanding the business need, and delivering exactly what is needed. I have 20 years of experience managing companies - which helps me understand the smal to medium business very quickly

Once the site is up, I continue to support the business I work with, and that is why I charge the fees I do. FWIW - my local chamber of commerce and business link say my fees are way too low!

Sometimes - value isnt judged by price alone. its the same for professional photography
 
Richard King said:
Im in business - the B&B is in business, and thats what it costs.. And thats why a B&B owner will understand my pricing

Considering a single yellow pages add cost me double that, and A google adwords campagn could cost many times that a year - I would say that is good value. You also need to consider... The kid in the bedroom isnt paying tax and NI - I am... £800.00 less tax and NI is about £520.00

For this money I would spend a week solid (or more) delivering a website that drives business through the customers door - I would not use flash, as that will be the worst technology paltform for this type of customer. The work i do then includes subsequent work with SEO and google analytics afterwards. I spend time understanding the business need, and delivering exactly what is needed. I have 20 years of experience managing companies - which helps me understand the smal to medium business very quickly

Once the site is up, I continue to support the business I work with, and that is why I charge the fees I do. FWIW - my local chamber of commerce and business link say my fees are way too low!

Sometimes - value isnt judged by price alone. its the same for professional photography
Click to expand...

Could not agree more. Well said.
 
sounds quite good value in truth, how long does the support last?
 
A simple website will only cost £200 the most using a company. My first one cost a £100. I am having a new one done at the moment and it has been quoted at £350 which will be a singing all dancing.

You could always do one yourself, I did and used it for a few years. the cost for your domain name and hosting is cheap E.G £30 look at Fasthost or 123reg. I done my site using a program call Cool Pages, here is a example of one done in Cool Pages www.roundbellies.co.uk
hth
 
spelling error in the top title a bit worrying on the roundbellis site.
 
£800 is more than a bargain, Professional in each industry may seem expensive but the job is done to a high standard, and you can pay alot more than £800.

It all depends on the content, features etc.

I base my quotes on the time I guess it is going to take, the features, amount of coding, amount of revisions.
 
Hi, all thought ide have an input on this as im a web designer by trade. Im only 24 and been doing this for a good 7 years now.

My most recent website, and still in development (well the translations are) is www.codel.co.uk.

And this was designed as customer required. It consist of about 110 English pages, (same again for each translated website) each created by myself, no templates or help, it was designed using microsoft frontpage and the php obviously written as code.

My post is mainly to point out, prices depend on quality, the saying "you get what you paid for" stands with web design.

For me, a web design consists of the design, development, proofing and optimising. Optimising being a huge part of web development now and i think without understanding what SEO is, and/or how to optimise a website, designing one would be rather useless. Its like opening a shop and hiding it behind a brick wall!

For instance (and please bear in mind that this website has only been up a few weeks, and google still has the beta version cached). But if you go to google and search for codel, we are obviously first, if you search for emission monitors (which could be anything from hand held monitors to car automotive analysers) codel is 2nd, "tunnel sensors" were 2nd and many more like:

road emission monitors : 1st
tunnel emission monitors : 1st
stack emission monitors : 2nd

And i hope when google finally cache's the new site thats currently up then it will be even better. This is likewise for yahoo and msn and others.

So my point being after all this waffeling im doing.

If you can find someone, who can design a website (design, develop, proof and mainly optimise it for SE) then its worth paying for. But if its website that you can only find by there domain name, then its not worth alot.

So if your a designer, charge on your knowledge
If you a buyer, research and get what you willing to pay


Cheers
Andy
 
68lbs said:
There's kids in bedroom's that'll put together a website for clients like this in exchange for a tube of spot cream and a bottle of vodka.
Click to expand...

:lol:
 
gibbon said:
Hi, all thought ide have an input on this as im a web designer by trade. Im only 24 and been doing this for a good 7 years now.

My most recent website, and still in development (well the translations are) is www.codel.co.uk.

And this was designed as customer required. It consist of about 110 English pages, (same again for each translated website) each created by myself, no templates or help, it was designed using microsoft frontpage and the php obviously written as code.

My post is mainly to point out, prices depend on quality, the saying "you get what you paid for" stands with web design.

For me, a web design consists of the design, development, proofing and optimising. Optimising being a huge part of web development now and i think without understanding what SEO is, and/or how to optimise a website, designing one would be rather useless. Its like opening a shop and hiding it behind a brick wall!

For instance (and please bear in mind that this website has only been up a few weeks, and google still has the beta version cached). But if you go to google and search for codel, we are obviously first, if you search for emission monitors (which could be anything from hand held monitors to car automotive analysers) codel is 2nd, "tunnel sensors" were 2nd and many more like:

road emission monitors : 1st
tunnel emission monitors : 1st
stack emission monitors : 2nd

And i hope when google finally cache's the new site thats currently up then it will be even better. This is likewise for yahoo and msn and others.

So my point being after all this waffeling im doing.

If you can find someone, who can design a website (design, develop, proof and mainly optimise it for SE) then its worth paying for. But if its website that you can only find by there domain name, then its not worth alot.

So if your a designer, charge on your knowledge
If you a buyer, research and get what you willing to pay


Cheers
Andy
Click to expand...

Sorry but got put off when you said it used Frontpage.

Even Microsoft have now dropped support for the product.

Website design prices though are a bit like wedding photography in the feelings it arouses. Richard has it right with what he said.
 
Folks, lets get real. If you want a professional website designed by a company who is going to be around for some time and able to make changes adhoc in future, and will ensure the site is optimised and designed to conform to search engine protocol to ensure high classification, you are going to pay for it. If you want a cheap site which streches your webserver bandwidth, from someone who does it after reading "HTML for Dummy's" then fair play, but you'll get what you pay for.

Richard's price is not unreasonable provided he's decent. I no longer work as a designer full time but I do the odd job to keep my hand in and my prices are a little lower to reflect the fact that I'm not an established webdesigner who can offer guarenteed support on defined SLA timescales. Having said that, I'd still charge between £600-£1000 for the OP's job dependant on the actual spec. Do they want a dynamic gallery of pictures they can add themselves via a PHP GUI, or just a few pics on a page which never change? Do they want a script to mail them via the website, or just their contact details in text on a page. Little details like that make a big difference to the time you will spend on it.

Having said that, it's your venture, and if you are doing this in your spare time, then your price should be based around how you value your time, and what level of quality you feel you can provide.
 
web design is like photography - full of people doing it for sweeties - and clients who don't care - or don't know the difference - as long as it's cheap. sad really.
 
And to add, your right about frontpage, microsoft have dropped it, doesnt meant its not a good product. It is very good if you know how to use it and strip the code from its good and bad stuff. Once you have done that you end up with cleaner code than other software's pages.

Andy
 
You get what you pay for.

I've just been quoted £1,800 for a fairly straightforward, non-shop, site. And that doesn't include graphics branding and design which will be another £570. Still seeking other quotes, not due to price but due to the platform this first quote will be on.
 
fletch5 said:
sounds quite good value in truth, how long does the support last?
Click to expand...

Example - We recently totally re-wrote some code, for a customers site... It was a flash movie loader. Essentially Adobe (in thier infinite wisdom) moved the goalposts with Flash player 10, causing the original code that worked fine in all previous versions to throw a bizzare error. This was done for free for the customer, well over a year after the site was written

Example - for another wedding and portrait photographer - we swapped a few images about on a site, and changed the phone number on a site we wrote 4 years ago

Example - A host that will remain namless stupidly "upgraded a server" and reset everyones FTP passwords.. Unknown to the muppets doing the server "upgrade", it also reset he SQL database passwords. On that weekend, we sorted the config scripts for 3 sites (e-commerce, gallery, BB board etc.. )

For most sites we offer 3 months of fairly intense support (that doesnt involve a re-write). Because we listen to our customers, if we feel they are up to it, we design the site in a way that is easily updatable, the support may just involve training (how to swap an image themselves). For example on one photographers site we designed it in a way where the photographer could genertate slideshows in photoshop, and just ftp them over the top of the existing one.. essentially we doctored the xml file. Support in this case might be reminding them how to use the ftp client (which it was)

For more complex sites where support will be ongoing due to continuious changes (large e-commerce sites) we offer a retainer contract etc.. because I know and the customer knows that the level of support they need isnt cursory

So to answer the question - most customers get free ongoing support, unless it is obvious that their support they need will be by design or circumstance substantial. In reality for a few months there are a lot of calls, whereupon it generally calms down to the odd call every now and then. If the customer calls wanting 4 pages redesigned, then they will allready know my answer!
 
I built a B&B website last year to that spec and I charged £280 quid. Nothing fancy. Just flat html files with a bit of old fashioned cgi in the back for a contact form. That included registration and hosting of the site which I then transfered onto them. I was happy and they were happy. Can't say fairer than that :)
 
gibbon said:
And to add, your right about frontpage, microsoft have dropped it, doesnt meant its not a good product. It is very good if you know how to use it and strip the code from its good and bad stuff. Once you have done that you end up with cleaner code than other software's pages.

Andy
Click to expand...

It's a terrible product. That's why they dropped it.
 
Although this is down to opinions, and i agree many people do not like it. But it is a powerful product. Im not saying its the best, and im not saying others arnt good. I use dreamweaver and others just as much. But as i know frontpage very well, i know how to use it well and get good results.

Andy
 
I spent ages learning about dreamweaver and then discovered wordpress.

Its fantastic blogging software and is great for creating a quick website.

If you put chelmsford Fuchsia into google you will see on the front page www.chelmsfordfuchsiasociety.net, a domain name I bought for my mum's group just last sunday.

It took a couple of hours to design/set up. It cost us £29 to set up (cost of domain name and hosting) an dafter a couple of hours showing them how to do it I will hand it over to the group to maintain - posting to it is as easy as posting an email.

I think you could charge £200 - £300 for setting one up and everyone would be happy

stew
 
frontpage really isnt that bad i have several websites all built from frontpage and 3 of my biggest sites are all first page on google with many different keywords.

I KNOW VIRTUALLY NOTHING about website design yet have mangaed to build 3 crackin websites with frontpage the biggest just over 1 gig and advertises over 1000 businesses in my local area, comes up with over 60,000 unique hits a year and is my baby :D

i think about £200-£500 should get you something worth having
 
I don't think Richards quote is unrealistic at all, on the contrary I think it is quite reasonable.
 
Some sites we charge £500 per page but they have lots of aspx code and database functionality.
 
Depending on the size and scope of the project I would give a base quote, extras go on top of the base quote and then on top of that I charge £48 per hour
 
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