I’m looking for Dopers in the web design and graphic design fields to give me an estimate of the going rate for certain tasks.
Project one: Redesigning the entire front end of a company’s web site. This includes designing the logo and graphics and the design of the entire front-end (public) web site. Includes designing a news blog with RSS feed. Most of the work is done in CSS-styled HTML with some light Javascript (as in the designer didn’t do the codng to connect the web site to the database, etc.)
Also, ongoing upkeep of the site, including updating the site with new content regularly. Making whatever small and large changes to the site the president wants.
Project two: (actually multiple projects).
–Designing a half-page magazine advertisement (full color, etc.)
–Designing letterhead and business cards.
–Designing a full color flier to be handed out at a conference
–Designing a full color mousepad as a give-away to clients
Anyway as you may have guessed, I am the one who has done the above tasks. Basically in a nutshell, I work for a government relations/political consulting firm. My job has nothing to do with web or graphic design - I am a state legislative and regulatory researcher. However, in my spare time, as a hobby, I do a lot of web and graphic design. My boss wanted to redo our web site and I offered to help and once she realized what I could do, she got me to do more and more stuff…
While I really enjoy doing it, and it is really good experience to add to my resume, I would like to get an estimate on the true value of the work - basically, what it would have cost my boss to pay a professional web or graphic designer to do the work I did.
For Project One, I’m afraid it’s going to be difficult to come up with much of an estimate without knowing more details about the site. For example, “The entire front end” could be one page or a hundred.
Maybe you could estimate the number of hours you put into the job, and the web-design types could weigh in with their hourly rates?
Where I work, we generally charge $70 - $100 (CDN) per hour. I’m not a designer, I’m a programmer, but I think the designers’ rates are in the same ballpark.
Full-time web designer who does a lot of freelance stuff too chiming in here…
I aim to get about $50-75/hour for my work. As MrSquishy said, that’s hard to gauge in this case from my standpoint. I do both front-end and back-end, but charge the same for both.
I try to stay away from graphic design, as print work certainly isn’t my forte, but I charge almost exactly the same for that when I get suckered into it.
I worked on about 20 separate pages, and spent about 80 hours*, including redoing the entire look and feel of the site (layout, color scheme, theme), coming up with logos and banners and graphics. I basically conceived and created the entire “brand” identity for the company with the new logo and graphics.
(* this is an extremely rough estimate)
And I am spending about 4-8 hours a week on upkeep and maintenance (and whatever additions and changes she asks me to do)
My friend redid my company’s entire website and logo/look-and-feel for a discounted rate of $35 an hour, which came out to a total of around $700. However, that was just six pages of CSS/HTML with no javascript, no RSS feeds, and no subsequent upkeep.
Most other designers I know are charging well over $50 an hour for basic design, more for back-end and database work.
As others have noted, a graphics professional generally wants $60 to $100 an hour for graphics design work. I usually hear something like 5K to 7K to do a logo and other materials that go with a business identity and to build a website such as you describe. Custom Java scripting and such adds to the price.
Projects are often negotiated up front and many quotes depend on how business is going. One of the biggest challenges for those doing this type of work is that many clients know people who are “artists” and others that have Microsoft Frontpage (or something like it) who can knock out a website in an hour or two using a standard template.
Unlike something like practicing law or plumbing that looks complicated and dirty, web authoring looks easy to some. Clients are often not aware of issues - important issues - in the way of load speed, how the sites appear to search engines, and compatibility with other browsers.