I swear, I’m going to write off a letter to my alma mater for not clearing up this sort of thing for me! Anyway…
Are you a freelance web designer? Have you hired a freelance web designer in the past? If you answered “Yes!” to any of those queries, help a gal out here and offer some suggestions as to fees for certain tasks.
Do you charge by the hour? By the page?
What about the fee for creating a new design? For altering a previous design? For creating new pages using the old design as a template? For doing basic updating/maintenace?
Creating simple graphics? complex graphics?
Just as a note, I’ve been told on the tech lists I’m on that discussing fees in terms of actual dollars in public fora such as this is considered price-fixing and therefore illegal by the legal-types, and is therefore verboten on these aforementioned lists. IANAL, I have no idea if this varies by jurisdiction, but thought I’d mention you’d want to proceed with caution.
Anyway, I charge both by the hour or by the page, depending on which way it makes more sense to do. e.g. if I’m building a design from the ground up, I charge per page, as it’s sort of an assurance to the client that I’m not going to dick around and waste time just to increase my take on the deal. (I’m also very VERY clear in the contract what exactly they get for the per-page fee, so they’re not dicking me over by making me spend more and more time on dozens of annoying small changes because they can’t make up their mind. They get up to three basic original designs, choose one and one round of major changes, and one round of final minor tweaks, before I start charging hourly.)
If it’s maintenance on an existing design/site, I charge by the hour, since I’m not actually producing the pages, and how long it may take will be extremely variable depending on the types of changes and the existing structure of the site. I also charge more for stuff like multimedia or other more advanced skills than I do for a basic HTML/CSS/javascript site.
When charging hourly, I do specify that I round up to full-hour increments. It’s just less complicated for me. Although I’m also nice enough to ignore small overages of time, say the last 10 mins of something that took 3 hours and 10 minutes to finish.
Well in case in helps, a buddy of mine just recently got asked to design a website for a small auto parts business. He’s taking away 3 grand CDN from this one, not bad for about a month’s work if you ask me.
Despite all warnings to the contrary, I am quite curious now.
I am a student. I work part time for the University’s Career Center; designing, building, testing, maintaining various database-managing ASP.NET applications in C# for a very modest fee.
What are professionals getting paid, on average, for this stuff?
Um, Kaio, that is just nonsense. A small business can charge anything they want, advertise it where they want, and seek advice on what to charge anywhere they want. That’s hardly collusion. You really shouldn’t spread stuff like that.
I’ve paid anywhere from $20 to $60 per hour for web designers. I know that’s a wide spread; just varies on the work done and the experience of the designer. Also, your location will impact what you can charge.
You’re wise to put together a site yourself for your business, and it should be extra nice.
Well, if it’s illegal, the mods can delete my post or whatever. I emailed this to moi, but I may as well post it here.
I used to do some freelance web work around 2000-2002, so my old rates might not be current, but whatever. When I worked with a small group of other freelancers, we’d bid on projects as a unit, there was a basic web design guy (me) who could also do writing stuff, a graphics/web designer type (more artistic), and a more hardcore server admin type. Our going rate was about 50-60 bucks an hour.
When I did stuff on my own (coding, not too much in the way of fancy graphics), I’d charge $10-30 an hour, depending on how much work I thought it was, who the client was, how much other work I had to do, that kind of thing. Oh, and how much actual work I had to do. If it was basically throwing some code in a few templates, it’d be towards the lower end. If I had to rewrite every word on the site, it’d be higher.
I usually charge by the entire project. This includes design, graphics, and other related work such as JavaScript programming. It’s hard to quantify creative work by hours – I could sit there for hours without coming up anything while working on a project. I suspect most people are the same way.
