How much to charge for freelance web design work?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I don’t like the idea of charging by the page, because what constitutes a ‘page’ varies so much. I’ve written pages for an internet site in 15 minutes, and I’ve written pages that I labored over for many days. It depends on the complexity of the layout, whether the images have to be generated from scratch, what kind of active content is underneath (javascript, JSP/ASP, database queries to build page content, etc). Also, once a company has you locked in to a ‘per-page’ fee, it’s amazing how demanding they can suddenly get about the contents of that page. You’re much safer to quote by the hour or by the job.

Also, does this person have to manage the infrastructure? Install databases on the server? Get domain names registered? Set up site counters? what about security?

Also consider ease of updating the site. If you get a programmer on a ‘per-page’ basis, he may take the easy way out and simply hard code everything into the page - text, styles, imagetext, etc. It’s the fastest way to build a page, but what happens when the content needs to change? It might be easier to build a page that loads text from a database of from an XML file and transforms it on the server. I’ve even written pages that could be updated by end users by sending E-mails to a special mail address.

No one should offer their quote until they have a full set of requirements. Often, what happens is that you sit down with the customer and work out requirements in detail. Once you have those, you can do a quick prototype for an initial fee or even a set of simple storyboards for what the site is going to look like. Make sure all the infrastructure detail is worked out. Once you have all that, then negotiate a price for the whole project. Or, you can just go on an hourly basis and put in a cancellation clause if you don’t like the pace of the work.

22

I agree with those bringing up the idea of “by the page” designing. Any site worth its salt right now is done with a database backend (MySQL is free and runs on anything, Access is pretty typical - although shoddy - and can run on any Windows server, and most hosts have SQL if you have some hefty data).

Pre-built CMS systems are nice, but I’ve never used them because my company specializes in making database-based sites with custom “backends” that let the client make updates themselves.

Database sites with backends are more pricey, but it’s an easy sell to tell someone “you can either pay us an extra grand or two now and never speak to us again, or pay us $60 an hour every time you call us and want an update.”

Building a site like this is sort of a whole other skill set, but there are oodles of pre-done PHP/MySQL-based scripts (from snippets to whole applications) out there as well as tons of free info and help. He’d just have to learn how to customize all this stuff and use it properly.

Since this is in IMHO now, I will assert that charging sites “per page” and making static HTML is pretty 1999 :wink: A move to a dynamic site is really in everyone’s best interest. Think of it as a PROJECT, a working application, and not a pamphlet on the web.

Like someone said, FrontPage sites are a dime a dozen.

23

Not only that, but unless FrontPage has changed dramatically in the last couple of years, such sites work reliably only for viewers using Microsoft browsers and operating systems.

Back when I was doing freelance Web design, a substantial portion of my business was rebuilding FrontPage sites for companies that got tired of losing sales because their site didn’t work properly on Netscape/Linux/Opera/Macintosh/whatever.