Pricing Help for freelance website design...

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--Purple--

New Member
Hi all,

I'm new to this forum, and i was wondering whether i could get some opinions on what people charge for web design.

I have been given a brief to re-design a 25 page website for a charity with £1000 budget to spend. Obviously I'm not going to charge that much as I have just graduated and i am just starting out in the freelance world.

The website will be coded using HTML and CSS with some PHP for the contact form. (I am toying with the idea of using Adobe Muse for easier page management, as i have used it before and it has been very successful).

I was wondering what kind of price would be reasonable to charge for this type of design / coding?? As this if one of my first proper clients and i would like a bit of a guide really.

Any suggestions and comments would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks :)
 
Hello and welcome to the forum.

£1000 is a reasonable web budget and it'd be silly to refuse the full sum, provided you're up to the job of writing the code, editing & maintaining the site etc..?! I'll be honest and say that using Muse won't go down too well with the web developer members on this forum (it'd be a bit like using publisher to create a professional poster) and in the long run you're making life hard for yourself (especially if you're intending including php, JQuery etc.. as wysiwyg editors like Muse handle code very badly) but again it all comes down to your abilities. If you cant produce a website that meets the client's needs without cutting corners, then perhaps you're not ready to be taking on a full site build just yet?

Maybe the best way to work would be to team up with a developer on this one? So you wine & dine the client, find out what they want/need, then produce the pretty designs and hand them over to a developer to code up into a functioning site. You'll likely only get to keep 40-50% of the budget as your share BUT the client will end up with a much better product than you can produce on your own at the moment and so is likely to return when new projects come up.
 
Thanks Bigdave for the reply,

I've made 3 website so far and 2 of them have been coded and one of them (which was my personal website) i used muse for. It was good for just doing it quickly but i know that in the near future i am going to change and update it so it will be hand coded. I am definitely up for the coding as i love that side of it and learning how to code new things, just wondered what people's views on the costings were really :)

I'm just a bit worried that if i ask for the full £1000 they might just laugh at me considering ive only been out of uni for 3 months and have not got much exp behind me. I was thinking about £600 + a fee per update in the future? It's a pretty basic website when it comes down to it, not really any fancy coding etc. Just trying to get some scope on the costings...

Thanks :)
 
Take the grand on offer. Even if you are fresh out of college, if you don't respect your time and skills then no one else will :icon_smile:
 
I might be going against the grain here but for a 25 page website that doesn't sound like a lot to me... you need an hourly rate then calculate from that. Obviously if every page is more or less the same then it won't take too long. Projects usually take longer than you first think, so bear that in mind.

Also,

Obviously I'm not going to charge that much as I have just graduated and i am just starting out in the freelance world.
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Don't do this, I'm in the same situation and I've learned very quickly if you charge a lower price than you should in the hope to just get clients, when you get recommended everyone expects that same price. I recently did a project which I thought would take around five hours, I charged appropriately, and in the end it took me a week due to client demands. It was a complete waste of time, time I could have spent on other client projects actually getting paid the correct amount!
 
--Purple-- said:
I was thinking about £600 + a fee per update in the future?

Thanks :)
Click to expand...

Fee for updating probably won't work with a charity. All the ones I have come across before have a fixed sum to spend on the website and then that's it. After that they have to be able to do all the updates themselves. That's why you need to give them a CMS. If you don't give them a CMS I think you're wasting their money. You can relatively easily set up a Wordpress install, grab a theme from Theme forest or Woo themes and customise it. The budget should allow you enough time to figure what's involved - it's all on Google anyway. If you are gulping at taking the 1K then remember you can use some of it to get help if you get stuck.
 
Can i just say that installing a CMS for a newbie is a big task. Alot of people here are throwing it out like candy.. like its like hanging washing online.

I could see him getting stuck terrible and for a long time. Ive been programming php for 6 years. Tho not constantly . but for sure i go hard on at it for a couple of years.

And some one asked me to install a BB forum on their website for them. And i thought it would be an easy task. It still took a day!


Alot of you coding gurus forget you have been coding 15 years or so.



I really think he has his work cut out to be able to install the word press blog and everything.

He should focus on what he can do well with adobe before he starts faffing around with the old <?php if (empty) {} echo "$result" ;

stuff you know..
 
bobchops said:
Can i just say that installing a CMS for a newbie is a big task. Alot of people here are throwing it out like candy.. like its like hanging washing online.
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That's a fair comment bobchops. Installing and learning a CMS can be a fairly hefty task, but that doesn't change the fact that the majority of web design jobs nowadays require a CMS of some kind. Particularly in the case of a charity where up-to-date information is a must and giving the client the ability to make changes themselves is the right thing to do. In fact I can't think of a website I've built in the last two years that hasn't been CMS based and clients always ask if they will be able to update it themselves.
 
I have been looking into using Joomla to create the website mentioned. I was wondering if anyone has ever used Artisteer - web design software and joomla template maker to create a customised template or know of anything or how easy it is to make your own template.

I've come across the fact that some templates cannot be used for commercial use, and trying to find one to match the design I would like it proving to be quite difficult. I do not currently have the server capability to try this out and test it. But I was wondering if / how easy it is to customise templates or a good place to find free / reasonably priced ones?

Sorry if all this sounds very novice but this is the first time I have been involved in working with a CMS system and I would really like to learn more..........

thanks :)
 
Corrosive said:
Take the grand on offer. Even if you are fresh out of college, if you don't respect your time and skills then no one else will :icon_smile:
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This. :icon_smile:

Corrosive you are quickly becoming my favourite member of these forums although stop stealing my thoughts haha
 
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