I’ve got solid skills in HTML/CSS, Photoshop, getting going with Javascript and ASP. Very strong writing/typography/layout skills. Utter contempt for Microsoft FrontPage (;)) but not above using it when it’s helpful. I’ve been doing content maintenance for large corporate websites on an occasional basis (as part of other jobs) for five or six years. I’ve got a few potential freelance clients lined up right now, but have never done freelance web work. What’s the going rate?
One person mentioned he was quoted $900 for 20 pages, including a credit card shopping cart function, and that person found the rate to be outrageous. I don’t find that particularly outrageous, but as a beginner, I’d be willing to go lower than that. How low should I go? What do you charge your clients?
I’d also appreciate any advice about freelancing, interesting stories, dealing with clients, taxes, etc. Thanks!
We’re just starting out (Maltrasea, myself, and Mr Wolf (who is registered here, but I don’t know his name)) - we charge per hour, rather than x amount for x pages. Some people don’t need twenty pages, after all.
We’re currently designing a site for a ‘death metal’ band that’s local, but nothing too remarkable there to report on.
The company url is in my profile if you really want to take a look at it.
Always charge hourly, rates based off of x amount of pages always will come back to bite you.
Plus align your self with a freelance web programmer who can provide functionality such as shopping carts or database driven sites that are beyond your skill set. A partnership works well - you can provide the glitz & the programmer can make it work on the back end.
My estimate would be to charge between 25 and 60 per hour depending on the skills you can provide.
An estimate for $900 on a site with about 20 pages with a cart sounds reasonable to me - and perhaps cheap if you consider all the functionality the client will want, such as the ability to update the cart themselves (clients are never happy with out of the box shopping carts), and credit card validation (those scripts from the bank to send a transaction often need tweaking to look the way a client wants them to).
Always quote twice the time youy think it is going to take, maybe since you are just starting out triple the time.
Clients are going to try to get the best deal they can - they may ask for javascript on a form to add items up - but make sure you know exactly what they want - they may want checkboxes, select pulldowns and textboxes all working together and something you though would take an hour takes a day.
Many things look like they would be easy to the client, but the backend work is quite intensive.
As a freelancer - it is sometimes better to tell the clients that what they want is a bit too much work for what they are willing to pay and find an alternate solution.
The one thig I never got to try in getting my associates was server-client web programming–what’s it typically written using, and what software can I use to practice writing them with on my own PC, that is, without needing a true web-enabled server? Such as: if I wrote a shoping-cart page, I want to be able to see that it really works by viewing the page in a web browser, but I don’t have access to any real internet server I can run code on… but I want the code to be legit, so that if I did move it onto a server, it would really work…? Anything like that out there (for Windows)?
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In developing for a client, I always get access to their host - I do mainly php/mysql sites and I test on my windows pc at home or build directly on their host if they are IIS (.net or asp), or java based.
It is always better to build on or for their host - server setups are not always identical.
What you could do is get windows xp pro with IIS & use access if you want to build for windows and get practice.