P/T & F/T Web Designers/Consultants/Developers: Is This Proposal Fair & Priced Right?

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK. A little background. Any input from those of you in the trade would be greatly appreciated.

Client: A masonry, brick and stone yard chain north of NYC.
Sales: $18M in annual sales
Clientele: 95% contractors / trade and 5% homeowners / retail

Issue 1: Does a mason supply yard need a website?
My sales staff here insists we need a web site. Their position is ‘everyone else has one’ I take opposing the position. Instead of playing the role of hard-headed, backward-thinking skinflint, I usually take the diplomatic route and layout the numerous reasons why a company website, for our type business, is both unnecessary and a waste of money.[ul][li]Our customer base isn’t internet savvy[]We’re not going to be doing e-commerce[]With the exception of a picture gallery of past projects, there’s really nothing noteworthy we’d publish on our website[]We’re not looking to increase our non-trade retail sales, the amount of ‘maintenance’ required to service a homeowner isn’t worth the extra point or 2 of margin[]The manufacturer’s and distributors of the products we sell already refer new customers / leads in our area to us from their websites.[/ul][/li]Issue 2: **Though possibly a waste of money, the small investment required to get a web site up and running is inconsequential. Let’s get a quote **
OK. Here’s what I have in front of me. A $3,350.00 proposal from a local designer who offers the following:[ol][li]8 to 15 New Company Logos to choose from (We dd need a new logo) – If we don’t like any of the choices offered, we pay a $300 kill fee.[]We get our domain name registered[]2 sample home page – If we don’t like what’s offered, we pay a $600 kill fee[]If we approve the logo and sample homepage, we get:[/ol][list=a][]A Home page with links[/li][li]An ‘About us’ page – with the history of the company[/li][li]A Services Page[/li][li]A Gallery page (with 10-20 images)[/li][li]A Links Page (With 20-30 suppliers)[/li][li]A Contact page[/li][li]A Directions / Map Quest page[/li][li]An Application / Forms page – For pdf files / spec forms to download[/li][li]The option to pay additional for a products/pricelist page[/list]I, for one, am not impressed. I’m no web designer – but I have the feeling I could do the same thing in my spare time with Front Page (and my green horn knowledge level). [/li]
There are a few ‘keywords’ I assumed I’d see in this proposal – but don’t. [ol]No sizzle or electronic gimmickry[li]No flash[]No reason to say yes[]Nothing that leads me to believe my investment will reap any rewards.[/ol][/li]
Questions for you Web Publishers out there:[ul]
[li]Is the $750 Logo design fee fair?[/li][li]Is the $2,600 (basic) website design fee fair?[/li][li]What, if anything, is missing (search engine registration, counter, etc)?[/li][li]Are the kill fees priced @ market?[/li][li]I’ll be getting a list of references from the design company (and will check out some of their clients sites). After following up with the references and provided I see some artistic flair, is there something else I should look out for and/or do before forging ahead? [/ul]Any advice, opinions or input will be greatly appreciated. Having been in sales, I know I sound like the typical NY customer (i e price price price) - but don’t know what other things I should look more closely at. [/li]
Thanks in advance.

2

I’m not a professional by any means, but I have designed and built websites on a freelance basis for several people and companies for the past 4 years. My initial thoughts are:

  • I have no idea about the logo fees. I don’t do graphic design, and all of the projects I’ve done for businesses thus far have used their existing logos.

  • $2,600 sounds extraordinarily overpriced for what will take this guy 1-3 days to do, given the outline he provided you.

  • The ‘missing’ things you listed take about 10 minutes to do, but would probably cost you $500 from this guy.

  • I’ve never heard of “kill fees,” but again, I don’t do this for a living (though it did account for about 40% of my income last year). If you mean that he’s going to whip up two webpages and give you the choice between the two, charging you $2,600 if you accept and $600 if you don’t like… well, no, that doesn’t sound like a good idea, at least on your end. On his, he’s making money either way.

  • Regarding their past work, I’d ask his clients how satisfied they’ve been with the level of communication with the designer, how adaptable he was to meet their needs, support options, etc. Also, where do you plan to host this site? Again, $2,600 without hosting sounds crazy.

Like I said, I’m not “in the business” and this is all from my experience - I do this kind of work freelance, and for what he’s offered, I would never ask for that kind of money. It also sounds to me like your business is doing fine without a website, and I agree with you that it sounds like you don’t even need one.

Personally, I’d tell this guy to take a hike. But, then again, YMMV.

3

I am a fulltime creative director plus a freelance web and print designer. I have done many jobs at your level of complexity. The prices seem fair for what you are asking, and are even low enough that I question whether the designer is really all that talented. What is the designer’s website?

“Kill fees” (I call 'em “liquidated damages intended to fairly compensate [Gaudere] for work done on company X’s behalf and not intended as a penalty of any kind” :wink: ) are in line with what I’d charge–a very large amount of work goes into the initial mockups and design, if you do them right. At least 1/3 of total work, most of the time.

“sizzle or electronic gimmickry” and “flash” generally actively work against the purposes of the site, which is to convey information about your company. Whether your investment will reap any rewards is very hard to quantify, but I have to say that if I was going to pick some masonry, I’d call up the place that had a website that showed me samples first. There’s also the impression that if a place doesn’t have a website, they’re a bit fly-by-night.

Search engines on such a small site are not really needed. Nearly every webhost will track your traffic.

You might want a mailing list signup where customers can sign up and you can email/mail them any specials, news, etc. Email is practially free (as spammers have found) and you won’t run afoul of spam laws if people willingly agree to have you send 'em stuff.

If you put your email addresses on the web, you will get a ton of spam. That’s just the way it is. But some people prefer to email rather than call–I know I do.

4

Oh, and yes, you could do it in Front page. What you probably cannot do it make it look fully professional. There is an instantly recognizable difference between good design and bad design, and frontpage’s website-in-a-can are just not very good. Plus given how much you make and the time it takes to learn a new program and create a site, it’ll probably cost more than hiring out.

5

<hijack>

I wasn’t under the impression that people who do this for a living charge that much. I know how much time it generally takes me to create a site that receives an A+ rating from a client, and given that it almost always takes less than a week (the longest site I’ve built took 15 days, some have been completed in under 2 days) to prepare, I just wouldn’t feel right charging that much.

</hijack>

6

This is what I was going to tell you, as a customer who purchases construction materials. I don’t look for (or even want to see) fancy gimmickry, but a simple, well-designed website can go a long way with me. All other things being equal, I’m more likely to buy materials from an operation that has one than from one that doesn’t. It shows a level of… not sophistication, necessarily, but professionalism. I like to be able to communicate with suppliers by email, especially if I can get drawings and specs electronically rather than by fax (can you do this? this capability is more important to me than the website itself).

If I were in your position, I’d also want to know how the site will be marketed. I really don’t know anything about how Google finds the sites that pop up in response to searches, but I’d want to make sure that your new site can be found by someone looking for the materials you sell. It won’t do you any good if nobody sees it.

7

IMHO, professionalism and expertise is all very well and good, but it’s not $3000 good at the level you seem to be talking about. Personally, I think all you really need is some geocities basic laid out html page that doesn’t look absolutely horrible. For that level of buisness, as long as I can find the information I need, I’m happy.

As long as you understand some fundamentals of what makes a good webpage, just pay $50 for some neighbourhood kid to show you the ropes and then put a link up on the dope for some opinions. Monitor your usage stats and if you find significant amounts of traffic are coming in via the website, then maybe consider a professional version.

8

What’s your hosting agreement?

Basically,I don’t see addressed how much extra it will cost you to actually serve up this web site to users. This is usually measured in GB per month, and is usually much more than initial design. A website does no good if your ISP shuts you off after you served 5 pages a month cause you hit your limits.

I don’t see anything about hosting/bandwidth fees, server space, etc. Bandwidth/hosting is expensive, and recurring, usually by month. Is this to be put on your server at your site, managed by you, on your internet connection? How fast is that connection? Or is this person providing server space/bandwidth? How much server space(in GB?) Is it in his basement, or is it in a reputable data center/hosting company? Whose? If so, what’s your allowed transfer rate(Mb/s, and GB/m; or how much can you transfer this second vs. how much total data can you transfer this month)? What are the charges for going over your transfer limits? Do they have 24/7 support staff, or other off hours support? (you’d be suprised how many people will hit your site off-hours, they seem to equate it to going car shopping, they go when the salesmen aren’t there.) Again, monthly recurring cost for that?

If you need more rapid-fire questions let me know, I have more.

As for your design questions, I did want to say, fast load times, and a simple, but quick-loading design is good(think google, yahoo) gimmickry=slow. simple=fast simple!=ugly

9

That was pretty much going to be my reply. I think every business should have something up on the web. At the bare minimum the page should have an address (with a link to mapquest is a plus) a phone number, a contact email (that is checked and used) and a very basic description of the business. Nothing fancy is really needed. If the company is in a business that doesn’t really require them to need a webpage, I don’t mark against them for having an ugly little page that looks like some assistant did it in frontpage.

As for the prices. Yeah, that seems about right. My company works with pharmaceutical companies that pay $300-400,000 for some very simple websites. Personally I think the prices out out of line and anyone who would pay that are idiots. But whatever. I’m downstream of the cashflow and it pays the rent.

I would tell that company to screw it and head over to register.com, buy a domain, host it there and upload a few files a hired hand made for you. You could hire a temp with web skills for a few days and still come out ahead. At the end of the day you’d have your pages at a very reasonable price.

10

I’ve done a few Web pages for people. My background is as a professional programmer - not Web page designer - but there’s not much call for C++ or high-end database stuff in the town I live in now.

I don’t do logos, so can’t comment/quote on that.

But for what you described - 9 pages, nothing fancy, pretty much straight HTML and an attractive layout - I’d charge between $1100-$1500. My flat rate for this type of work is $300 for the first page, and $100 for each additional page, if the additional pages follow the look and style of the first page. If you want something radically different for one of the other pages, I’d charge a bit more.

The domain registration would cost you $15 on top of that, and Web hosting fees (through a third party company that I recommend to most of my clients) range from $5-$15/month, depending on the amount of traffic you’re looking at.

11

Is the site going to get local traffic, or worldwide (or country-wide) traffic? I don’t know for sure, of course, but I can’t imagine bandwidth being a huge concern. There are web hosts who will charge $20-30 for 100 GB bandwidth. If the site isn’t that huge (as in a lot of pages) and doesn’t have a lot of dynamic content that sucks up bandwidth, and appeals to a local (or limited) audience, I can’t imagine needing that much bandwidth. But I could be way off.

Registering a domain is (at most) $35 a year. The actual cost of keeping the site online doesn’t sound that expensive. What you’d be paying for is a professional, unique-looking site. And that can cost you. How much is too much (or too little)? I couldn’t say.

12

I had a brief career as a freelance web page designer person on the side. All I have to say is… wow. I didn’t realize I could’ve charged so much!

But now I’m intensely curious to know what Gaudere would think of my homepage, for some reason…

13

$750 for logo design is pretty damn cheap if the guy has any level of talent.

If you’re in it for a living, don’t feel bad about what you charge. Remember, the company is making money off of your work. I’ve been paid up to $2000 for a few hours of photography. Do I feel bad? Hell no, because the client is making money off my work. You’re selling a product and you’re using your design skills. The client is not just paying you for your HTML coding, but for your creative designs, your layout skills, your visual talent. That’s the talent and time involved in making a good website, not using some cookie-cutter template and plugging in content as needed.

It all depends on the skill level of the web designer involved. Obviously, if you think your website will bring in more than $3.5K of additional business, then it’s a worthwhile investment for your company. If you don’t, then don’t bother.

14

Thanks for your valued input, Gaudere. I usually operate under the premise that those who pursue the cheapest price, find exactly what they were looking for - but wanted piece of mind. Even though several people questioned the proposed fees as exorbitant, I’ll heed your initial assessment that the proposed price is close enough to fair market or possibly too low.

I checked out the design firm’s website before posting the OP. I guess I should’ve put a link in the OP. I also visited the sites of the 9 clients listed in the portfolio section. I realize appreciation of their design work is very subjective, but I have to admit I was impressed with the fact they appear to have done a better job / put more work into their client’s web sites than they have their own.

If you want to check it out the designer’s site, (after Candid Gamera’s of course), it available at: Delpinho Design

I’ll cede the point. I definitely wasn’t alluding to the need for midi files of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, ‘Thick As A Brick’ or ‘It Stoned Me’.

I have a question and would be interested to hear how you’d answer a client during the sales cycle:
Based on links to two companies in my industry: Stone Yard.com (Who actually does e-commerce) and Belden Brick (Manufacturing). Both, IMHO, leave me flat.
Would you point out to me that there’s no need to re-invent the wheel – or try to dazzle me with morphing gif images of ‘before and after’ project photos?

I spoke to a lot of my customers, and the few that actually use the internet, (mainly architects from the AIA), pretty much echoed your sentiments.

I have a question for you as well Enginerd:
Would you agree that the images (shades, textures, colors, et al) of building materials you see on the internet aren’t close enough to professional literature and can’t hold a candle to actual samples?

I didn’t include them in the OP for fear for muddying the waters. I assumed they were in line…But I know assuming is never a safe strategy.
Domain Registration Fee $30/Year
Hosting $20/Month
Hosting Set Up Fee $50 (1x)
Alterations / Web Site updates $50/hour
That looks fair, no?

[quote=Etherman]
[ul][li]How fast is that connection?[/li][li]Is this person providing server space/bandwidth? [/li][li]How much server space(in GB?) [/li][li]What’s your allowed transfer rate (Mb/s, and GB/m)[/li][li]How much can you transfer this second vs. how much total data can you transfer this month?[/li][li]What are the charges for going over your transfer limits? [/li][li]Do they have 24/7 support staff, or other off hours support?[/li][li]Monthly recurring cost (support service)?[/ul][/li][/quote]
Well, Etherman, based on the general fees listed in the proposal, it definitely appears to me I have many Q’s to ask, T’s to cross and I’s to dot. I guess the web site hosting business is no different than any other; the devil’s in the details.

Agreed. According to the services section on their site, they’ve done logos for:

The 2001 Mini Eliminator Brunswick Bowling (Top right on screen)
Milton Bradley’s Frog Head Board Game (Which probably never made it into production)
Solid State Cooling Systems (Which I like – but they don’t incorporate the logo on their web page)
& Adrix Contracting (I assume they’re out of business, but the work is on the designer’s flash site - Which is my favorite)

pulykamell, if you think otherwise, please say so:
I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say the design firm who has given me the proposal is a fly-by-night company. From my layman’s perspective, they seen professional…but what do I know?

15

You can do better than that yourself (or somone’s self) and it’s not even that hard to do. You can register a domain name for $9.95 at GoDaddy.com (or other places), get hosting for $9.95 at E-hosts.net (or other places) with a signficantly smaller set-up fee, maybe $20?

Though I suppose it all depends on your level of familiarity. You could update the site yourself after it’s been designed fairly easily, though changing the look of the site itself would likely neccessitate the designer’s help again, unless someone has experience with web design.

16

Looking at those designs, I find some very nice, and I find a few so-so. The ones that particularly appeals to me is the Solid State Cooling Systems logo and Admiral Electric. The ones I am less-than-thrilled with are Outlook, How It Works, and Photo File. Yuck. Also, Mitch Andrew’s not too bad, but I don’t like the shadowed relief. Anyhow, if they use multiple logo designers, I’d see if I can get somebody who worked on those accounts.

The web pages themselves are a bit mediocre, in my opinion. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re not worth what he’s charging, but I would make sure they stick to cleaner designs, rather than some of the cluttered ones they have.

17

The designers look pretty good. Their best pieces are extremely image-heavy–huge photos, large chunks of text as an image rather then HTML–which is not what I like to see on the web–speedy downloads still matter. (I suspect they are primarily print designers who have recently gotten into web, based on their information architecture and use of photos, as well as having in their portfolio many sites that haven’t been put live yet.) However, for a small showpiece site, it is not a great sin and does look impressive. Make sure the web design samples you see are actually done by the designer you are getting–they might dazzle you with stuff done by their lead designer and then your actual design is done by a new hire. Whoever did K&S construction, rachelwhittemore.com and MSD marketing looks the best. (K&S construction isn’t live and MSDmarketing.com has broken links and looks worse in person than the snap (IMHO), though, so this person may have trouble with execution.)

They like making Flash sites. They even stick Flash in when it is absolutely not needed. I advise against that since Flash sites tend to annoy people, all the zooming about and loading while they’re thinking “I just want to find out your %$#@! hours!”. Please, no sounds on the site. Also, put your hours and addy and phone somewhere on the front page–it doesn’t have to be big, but it saves users frustration.

Logos look decent. They like shiny embossed logos, which I do not–it looks initially “jazzy” but it is not sophistcated (name one major company with a embossed logo); embossed logos reproduce terribly over fax, and you will have to print in 4-color for a color logo. If you chose a 2 color logo you can save up to 30% in printing costs for cards, letterhead, etc. over 4-color. Their flat logos are nice.

I’d say morphing gifs are slow to load and annoying. If you want to see the before, you’ll want to sit and look at it–when you want to see the after, just the same. The morphing takes the decision out of the client’s hands, which is hardly ever a good thing on an interactive site. Beldon does the better job in terms of product display (except for the VB error on the right), although I would like it a little cleaner and classier, a little stronger design. There’s a lot of ways to do a portfolio showing photos:

http://www.degiulio.org/portfolio_understated_elegance.html
http://www.pbadesign.com/portfolio/aronburg.html
http://www.calverley.co.uk/port/automotive.asp?page=auto1&item=JCP110

18

Absolutely. It doesn’t matter that much to me, because I bury what I buy - it’s mostly underground utility work. But I used to install pavers, and I’d never buy materials for that job without seeing the actual materials. For cosmetic work, even the professional literature doesn’t always cut it - you absolutely need to see samples.

When I mentioned working with electronic files, I was thinking more of specs, submittals, shop drawings - that kind of thing. There’s not texture or color involved - it’s mainly line drawings and dimensions. They don’t fax very well, and I’d much prefer to deal with .pdf files than blurred copies.

19

I totally agree with this. Though I work primarily as a freelance copywriter, I have designed several sites in my day, and since I only began freelancing a short while ago, my prices are still considered to be at the lower end of the spectrum. A more experienced freelancer than I would probably charge at least $7,000 for even a simple site for a business with $18 million in sales per year.

If you have an artist designing a site for you including not just layout, but graphics, logo, possibly content, layout and navigation, I think $3,500.00 is highway robbery, and, like Gaudere, I would want references or samples from the designer because he/she seems to be offering a lot for very little. You have to consider that, yeah, the design might take only a few days, but then there are other things, like actually making the graphics, getting your approval, going back, making changes. And if the changes are significant (you don’t like the graphics, want different photos, etc.), then the artist has to make or find those, then plug them in to the appropriate places, test the site to make sure everything works properly, submit it again for your approval, then make any changes if you want more, only to re-submit. Then there’s the Web content. If you work in a company large enough to have $18 million in sales per year, you probably have several execs, perhaps even an attorney who will want to review it. Do you know how hard it is to get one person satisfied with Web content, much less a group? Web site design takes only a few days to create, if you have a lot of perfectionists throw into the mix (which is a good thing, even if it’s frustrating) who have to approve the site, you’re probably looking at a process that may take several weeks or even months, not days.

And $750 for a logo package, with your choice of 6 logos? That’s an awesome price.

I’ll also agree with Gaudere on another thing - nothing is more annoying than unnecessary flash. I’ve noticed this a lot on advertising Web sites. It’s like they decide to use flash just because they’ve got designers who know how to use it, so they do. They don’t seem to get that just because you know how to do something, that doesn’t mean you have to do it. While flash has its place in design, it’s so often unnecessary and just not cool. It’s annoying as hell trying to read something on someone’s site if it’s moving all over the place.

20

Well, again, I know little to nothing about graphic design, so I can’t comment on that.

Well, that’s all well and good, but I would just not feel right charging $3000 for a dozen HTML pages, no matter how flashy and spectacular they were, even if I was in the business of doing this for a living. Hell, most of the people I’ve designed for generally want just one general template, and charging exorbitant rates by the page thereafter just seems like taking advantage of someone.