4 Steps To Effective Web Design Pricing

tutorialaday.com — Perhaps one of the hardest skills to learn in web design is how to fairly and effectively price your services. A project quote can either sell a client, or turn them away. Here are some guidelines on how to develop a web design pricing guide. Mar 4, 2007 View in Crawl 4

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spliffy Mar 4, 2007

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thanks, for the long post. it had 10x the insight and logic then the linked story did.

masterofnone Mar 4, 2007

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this is a good example of the blind following the blind. whoever wrote this article believes they have a clue.as a business owner and designer for over 20 years.... believe me when i say this article is incorrect.

foofy Mar 4, 2007

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Keep track of how much money clients _don't_ pay. This is considered an expense, and can be used as a tax write-off.

jrmy Mar 4, 2007

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@DonCarcharo Sure you are going to get scammed at some point even with contracts and all of that but you will be limiting your losses if the contract is big enough. It sounds like you are taking on some shady customers and providing them with items before they pay. How does someone download a "proof" before they pay you? The code/file/etc should not exchange hands until payment is made. That should also be in the contract. Now I am sure the common problem in your case is people simply not realizing how much it's actually going to cost and bailing out. They are probably not provided with anything past what was to be supplied by the bail out point. (You do have a clause such as this correct? You owe x amount if you cancel the contract at y time.) But this is just part of buisness and is not a scam. A contract if setup correctly and enforced by you will limit how far a scamer can go. You may still lose some but not much.As for CC charge backs, this is just a pain in the ass I don't know of a good solution. You could state in the contract that all payments must be verified before work is turned over or something like that. I suppose you could always run a credit check on the person too. They are entering into a contract with you and you do have the right to perform such actions. Finally, just think how much the contracts have saved you. I am sure you will agree it's much better to have those contracts simply for the 50% up front clause. This is a similar problem that contractors and such face all the time. I would be interested to see how they handle it.

leanbackvids Mar 4, 2007

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As previously stated, most design firms will charge $100-200+ per hour for their services. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to design/develop, because what matters is the value of the product. I can bust out a site in less that 8 hours, but I'd be stupid to charge only $400 ($50/hr). A quality site is easly worth $1,000+ to most clients. If you're setting up a CMS, it is worth at least double that.Having done freelance develop for 10+ years, I've found the best process is to provide both a single figure quote and an hourly rate for overruns. I make sure the client signs off on a specific list of deliverables and I provide a flat fee for delivering those item. For example, $2,000 for the site design/development and a maximum of 100 hours. If the client increases the project's scope or if I go over my estimated 100 hours, I then charge $75-100/hour. Also, any change request are billed at a minimum of 1 hour. This encourages the client to aggregate their requests rather than nit-picking me with one-off emails.My favorite quote to sum all this up..."If you s**t on your own leg, everyone else is going to think you smell like s**t."If you want to work hourly, get a job at McDonalds. Charge what you're worth.

stephiems Mar 5, 2007

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I agree with this. The clients who are unwilling to pay almost ALWAYS turn out to be the worst ones. Never ever fall for the line, "I know exactly what I want, I don't want anything extra." They will always change it 100 times because they aren't designers, and don't realize that their idea might not end up working out as well as it did in their head. People who don't pay also tend to be the ones that go "Ok, let me show my wife/neighbor/brother/sister and see what they say" and end up coming back saying, "They thought it needed to be a bit more this or that". If they are willing to pay a lot of money, it normally means they value designers, know you will do your job, and are willing to trust in you enough to pay you more.

doncarcharo Mar 5, 2007

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"It sounds like you are taking on some shady customers and providing them with items before they pay. How does someone download a "proof" before they pay you?"All web development is done on a testing server and the client gets the chance to approve the site before it goes live. In the case of a static site a more clever customer can just use an offline web archiving app and download the site via http. This is not a common problem by any means but it has happened."Now I am sure the common problem in your case is people simply not realizing how much it's actually going to cost and bailing out."That would be pretty tough. My contract clearly outlines pricing and provides a strict timeline with milestones. Payment is 50% down, 50% upon completion and there's no overage without prior client approval. So they know the costs. The thing is some people can come up with the deposit but just can't swing the final payment. "Finally, just think how much the contracts have saved you. I am sure you will agree it's much better to have those contracts simply for the 50% up front clause."Absolutely. Everyone should use contracts and I didn't mean to indicate that they're useless. Just that they don't provide quite as much protection as some people think they do.

monkeymagix Mar 5, 2007

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wow - long replies but really interesting too. I've been working for the past 8 years in corporate IT and this posting demonstrates the two different ways of quoting for IT project - Fixed costs or Time and Materials (T&M). The main difference between these two methods is which party assumes the risk. T&M - the client assumes the risk as the IT firms just keeps on charging even if it over runsFixed costs - the IT firm assumes the risk.When I first started working most projects were T&M but over time this has changed as companies got severely burnt by most projects overrunning and them picking up the bill. Its now very rare to come across T&M project. This means that the IT firms now spend a lot of time and effort estimating their project costs and trying to factor in a margin to make it worth their while. As you all know estimating is a cross between an art and a science - and the 3 firms I've worked with have all employed something similar to the complexity calculations that the original article used. These figures are then massaged by the sales guy depending on the desire to get the project etc. But the fact remains, these calculations are used to give a ball park figure.Anyway, big business or little business the problem still remains - IT projects are very hard to define/estimate/price.

sportfan99 May 31, 2007

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Some of these points are correct, but I'm surprised to see him Billing a full 40 hours a week, its extremely difficult for a freelancer (developer/ web designer). The overhead of running your business takes a lot of time and energy. I figure on more of a 30 hour work week. John - Professional Business Website Design. Cutting-edge, standards compliant Web Design<a class="user" href="http://www.edevmachine.com">http://www.edevmachine.com</a>

Closed Account Jun 8, 2007