A friend is balking at paying $75/hr. More like she’s balking at NOT paying it, since her website guy hasn’t updated anything since June. It’s contract time and she’s wondering what the current rate is. I’m curious, too, since that’s some nice money. All I have to do is teach myself some HTML and it’s pretty much just Wordstar. . . .
$75 an hour is a bit much if all that’s involved is plain static HTML. I would not pay more than $30 an hour for such work.
If the maintenance involved actual programming or difficult graphic design, then I would pay more.
He did the design and Flash and all and I agree that’s worth more money than occasionally updating something.
There is no standard rate. It all depends upon the local market and the complexity of the work.
If we maintained a site and the client came to us once a month with a list of things to be updated - and the list could contain anything from completely re-doing a graphic, changing the way a page worked, adding a section, changing meta tags, adding new/editing Flash - then yeah I would say $75/hour (actually it’d be $65 for us). Basically if I have to crack open an editor or image program it’s going to cost more. But submitting everything as a single scope is going to cost less hours because I can do the work more efficiently.
I’m also going to cost more if these changes do not occur on a schedule or as a group. If I get one phone call per day with one change this means I have to stop what I’m doing, interrupt another project and do your thing and you will be charged a higher rate for it (of course bug fixing is cost-free and grumble-free).
If it was just adding text news items to a news section once in a while, I’d say that’s baloney. More like $30/hr as friedo said. Or better yet, ask for login info so you can learn to change it yourself.
Wow, WordStar? Will the computer you’re running that on capable of connecting to the internet so that you can upload your HTML files? 
Wordstar 5, 6, & 7 run quite nicely under XP, thank you very much. 
<hijack>Unless you are making games, why would one use Flash to make a website? This is something I haven’t been able to figure out.</hijack>
Thanks,
Rob
Mostly I think it’s to piss off people still using dialup. Unless it’s a commercial site, when it’s used to slow access, even with a fast connection, for ones customers so much that they buy from somebody else.
So what you people are saying is that there should be a two-tier structure and real work costs more than something that even I could do.
There are several skills needed, depending on the site and the content. Not all work is equally as difficult, or requires the same level of skill.
Basic HTML, adding straight text/pictures/links will be far easier to maintain and should cost less than Java, web forms, or dynamic content tied into a database. Designing or significantly altering images is yet another skillset, and will bring a higher rate.
It’s hard to say exactly what the “going rate” is. Sometimes you can find someone with all these skills, sometimes you have to piecemeal the work out. Even then, they may charge per page or per hour, usually the latter, with varying rates depending on what exactly is being done. So, you may have one request but the work is charged at two different rates because it requires two different sets of skills.
I can’t say specifically what rates are average these days but I would guess that on the low end you’ll find around $35 an hour (basic HTML, etc.) and on the high end up to $80-90 an hour, depending on the type of programming necessary.
We never do anything for less than $75 an hour, and we’ve discovered that we’re under the going local market rate (Boston metro) of $100. We’ll probably upgrade to $100/hour for new clients in the 3rd or 4th quarter of this year.
We do, also, subcontract basic HTML work out to freelancers at $40 an hour. But those are people who are just doing grunt work, no sales/admin/project management like my partner and I, so their overhead is less in the grand scheme.
Like others said, depends on the local market. And how desperate the client/designer is. We’re not very desperate, so we’re willing to turn down work for less than $75 an hour. Or, in fact, initial jobs less than $5000.
That wouldn’t have been the case a year ago, though.
I charge piecework. Some updates are larger and more time consuming than others. But if you need me to change the “News” section of your front page and it’s maybe two paragraphs, I’d charge 15 bucks.