Is 120GBP adequate for WP one page site?

D

Davide

New Member
Hi everyone,
I need a professional advice. A client approached me saying 120 British Pounds (150 Euros) is all he's prepared to spend for a one page Wordpress site (each section customizable from back-end). This price will cover the whole production from design (including a logo reconstruction) to server (his own) set up and configuration. A sample of this is
http://marbens.es/
Isn't it too low? What do you think it would be a fair price? I estimated this would take me about 30 hrs to do and the local average freelance market rate is 16 GBP an hr (20 EUR).
 
I roughly base a simple website project on £100-120 a page, but that's on a minimum of 5 pages. As you'll take longer producing the first page and will then be able to churn out the rest based on the same layout. I'd expect at least £250 for a single page website and I would expect a freelancer to be charging around £30 and hour (I gather you're not in the UK so adjust the figures accordingly). So that means it has to be started and finished in a single day - can you do that?


Based on your 30 hours, you'll be out of pocket by about £780.

Also what's the on-going support contract? you can't just set up Wordpress and forget about it, it'll nag you to update every couple of days. But I'm not a Wordpress expert so maybe some one more experience will have a different opinion.
 
I would explain to him that in order to do a decent job on this project you will need to charge more. If he is struggling with increasing the budget, you may be able to spread the cost out over a slightly longer period of time, but to produce a one page website and a logo is not doable to the necessary standards for £120.

I would charge more than £120 for just the logo - but it depends what sort of clients you can attract and how badly you need the work. He simply may not have the budget either, in this case you will need to drop your standards in order to make this project work for you. Explain that he will only be getting one revision for his logo, any more will cost extra and that his website will consist of either a free theme, or a premium theme that he pays for - and design tweaks will cost extra.

Re-define the scope of the project and you could just make it worth your while.

Regarding WP hosting, you can just host it and leave it, but only if your website serves as a glorified brochure - anything more and you need someone maintaining it properly. Would you buy £200 a year insurance for a phone that costs you £50? Probably not. I'm sure he bought a £2 p/m hosting package or something similar... and isn't bothered about the many potential negatives that could affect his business by not running his site properly - but that's his decision and there's probably very little you can do about it!

Make sure you get some good work in your portfolio so that you can attract better clients!
 
Thanks Tim, that's pretty much the advice I was looking for.

I am in the south of Spain where living costs and financial crisis sure keep prices lower than in the UK, but the equivalent of £120 still feels too low.
If I'd go with your suggestion £250, according to local average rates, it should take me no more than 16 hrs to complete the project; this would probably be doable if all content, logo, features and server configurations were clear, good quality and made available from the beginning... But unfortunately, this isn't the case.

About Wordpress maintenance, for former projects I calculated £130 yearly - taking in consideration an average of 3 main Wordpress version updates a year and 2 plugins. A total of 8 hrs, but if the update messes up a plugin or theme then I make a loss. It'd be great to hear other opinions on this.
 
Thanks Sean,

I'm starting out here so it's basically a combination of both: I need the job and he doesn't have the budget.

He doesn't need a logo, as he thinks I can take it from a 590x90px pixelated badly-cropped banner some guy who knew photoshop did for him I don't know how long ago. For that price I will take it to photoshop and clean it a bit (but for sure I will have to find the logotype and replace that at least). 120£+ seems reasonable for a new logo, what about a reconstruction? Like turn a bitmap into a vector (given the image is not over complicated) ? Do you think this is good practice?

The hosting turns out is a 1and1 "make your own website" type. No MySQL & FTP management. So I told him to change it to another plan. I will need to learn a new admin panel, but that's ok. I guess I shouldn't be spending too much time on consultancy if he's not willing to invest on quality and security; the website is pretty simple and I don't think it will do much to his business.

Will keep reading in the forum how to make better clients. Thanks again!
 
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