Website Pricing ?????? (i need opinions)

[chinaski30]

i know it's a super general question, BUT could you folks give me some prices you quote for website design. my work is solid and i have had good feedback. any answer here is good and mucho gracias for your time.

[meglomor]

$2000 sounds about right for the project you described.

you may want to start by working out a decent hourly wage then apply that to the number of hours you think it will take.

$45 an hour sounds good to me.

[Factor1studios]

I highly relly on "custom" pricing. To me, no client is the same, therfore no project is the same, and no two projects can be shelf priced. I evaluate each client and their preceived value of the site. If they dont think they need one, they wont spend 2k on one. It is also your job to educate them, if you can show them more value than they see, and do a good job of showing it, they will spend the money.

---This is a long formula, but follow me here, it works great.

If you can quantify your service to them, they will pay. What I mean by Quantifing your service is, that if said company (Call them acme) is a service provider, They make $1000 from every project, averaging 10 projects a month. And they know that 50% of their sales leads come from online, and acme.com only ranks number 25. Their site gets 10 visitors a month.

If you can show them that your services will get them in the top 10 on a search engine, you can make the connection that they will receive a traffic increase of 75% making their new monthly trafic count 17. so if half of their monthly sales leads come from the internet (wich was 50% of their total traffic), they only had 5 clients a month from the site, they now have 9, an increase of 4, so they will make $4000 extra a month, $48,000 a year, for your services. Who doesent want to make an extra $48k next year?

You have just quantified your service in terms they understand. so now $5k for your site is no big deal. as long as you have the goods to deliver. Also pre-qualify your client. You should do this on your fist meeting. Straight up ask them their budget, if they have $200 to spend and not a penny more. Try to quantify quickly, and make sure you highlight your skills, but dont waste too much time. If they are cheap, let them be, Keep in touch with them and see how their $200 site looks in 6 months, then give them another call to see how it is going, re offer your services.

Never quote on an hourly basis. You can only sell yourself short. If you charg $45 an hour, and you have 5 billable hours a day (emails and phone calls are not billable, most of the time) 51 weeks a year, you will only make $45,900 this year. At a max, I think more than 5 billable hours a day is a busy day, you still have to invoice, make calls, answer emails, and find more projects. But if I charge $5000 to build a site in 30 to 40 hours total, I just made $130 to $160 an hour.

Hope that helps.

[madzigian]

That formula is very helpful in a number of ways. Pricing is something i have always struggled with as a graphic designer, especially when it came to quantifying services/validating skills and job pricing. But your formula gives a ballpark range to start with, which is a tough number to come up with having never done anything like this before and gave me a nudge towards an understandable way to scale pricing. Thanks for giving me a starting point.

[Factor1studios]

one of the hardest parts of that formula, is getting many of those details from your client. I try and have extensive interviews and meetings with my clients first. The more info I can pull, the better my proposal, the more acurate my service, and the happier the client.

I did not learn all this on my own. I cheated. I read this amazing book by an austrailian web company. the owner wrote an 800 page, 2 binder set book on how he became so big.

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/freelance1/

worth every penney. I have actually read it twice and keep it close by for refference. The guy is completely honest and offers great morall and ethical advice too. nothing fishy about any of his tactics.

let me know If I can be of other help.

[madzigian]

thanks....i'll check that book out.

[chinaski30]

thanks for the reply, i really appreciate your feedback.
It helped a lot...