web design cost?

I'm sorry but a 6-page website with form-to-email and a calendar should be off-the-shelf for £250-£500.

If you are doing custom work, then you can look at £500-£750 per day, but for a vanilla brochure site with no back-end work, no e-commerce... it should be off-the shelf. You re-skin it and add the customers own content and it should take less than a day.

You need to charge comparitively more for an off-the-shelf CMS (Joomla/Drupal etc) because a) they are harder to skin (in an original manner) and b) you are obviously losing follow-on work (updates etc).

If you can get more than that for these types of sites, you will be bucking the market trends - but good luck to you. Fair play if you can get the punters. But there are 000's of 'web developers' out there offering [standard] sites for peanuts; some are crap and some are cross-browser, validating, accessible sites - but the price is always the same.

If you are developing any bespoke stuff, work it out as multiples of your daily rate, but be careful because most customers want a fixed price for a specified project. Any over-runs will generally come out of your time. This is where the real money is, but the OP talking about a simple 6-page brochure site which is a different ballgame.
 
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I charge £25 per hour :S

You say it in a worrying way! I'm a digital developer at a big agency in Manchester and Im on less than that :P
Aslong as you're charging enough money to be happy with and think you are charging the right amount for your skills then don't worry about it!
My freelance rates change all the time but I normally charge a flat rate which is determined by what the project entails.
On a normal web developing project if someone offered me a project for £25/hr I would most likely take it but that's all dependabt on my current situation :)
 
You say it in a worrying way! I'm a digital developer at a big agency in Manchester and Im on less than that :P
Aslong as you're charging enough money to be happy with and think you are charging the right amount for your skills then don't worry about it!
My freelance rates change all the time but I normally charge a flat rate which is determined by what the project entails.
On a normal web developing project if someone offered me a project for £25/hr I would most likely take it but that's all dependabt on my current situation :)

It depends on whether this is your livelihood or not... Like you I'm a full-time employee paid less than £25/hr. But I also do my own independent work.. because it's ad-hoc and out of hours, I don't charge full rate and £25/hr is fine for that.

But you are an independent web developer, you'll need to charge a lot more... £50-£75 per hour. Partly as a sign of status - people expect to pay above a certain threshold for a good developer. But also you have to pay expenses, income tax, NI, CG Tax and usually charge VAT. Plus pay for all the time you are touting for work, are between jobs or are too sick to work.

So for Third Sector (charity/non-profit) you'll be looking at rates of £300-£400 per day, in the private sector you will be looking at £500-£750 typically, and if you have a niche skill or are working for 'platinum' clients, you might charge £750-£2000.

Edit: If you manage to swing a longer-term gig, then obviously the client will expect you to reduce the rates accordingly.
 
ha i'm getting paid £1 per hour and i'm happy with it for now lol.

to cut a long story short as to why college wasn't right for me so taught it all myself, which shows i am not commited or something like that so haven't been able to do anything. finally got a job from a family member, though a lot of this is marketing :( rather then any coding, and i get paid just under £50 per week with around 50 hours work atm thats £1 per hour.

i think i'm a mug or something because when i create sites for family/friends/friends of friends of friends i allow too much freedom to the person which results in a lot more work because they never know what they want so say to me to go wild, but then change everything in the end anyway.
 
That's people taking advantage of you being nice. There's doing favours and then there's taking the pee. I'd offer to do stuff for family/friends if you have spare time as it is good experience, but everyone needs to get paid no matter what type if work they do.
If it's what you want to do as a career I'd start charging them even just something small to start with otherwise you'll be undervaluing your skills in the future or even now!
 
I do stuff for free for family & friends... I couldn't possible charge them the going rate.

In return i get free building work, baby-sitting, medical advice, legal advice and beer.

But then again, someone is paying me for 40hrs a week so it doesn't matter. If you want to make a living out of it, you need to charge the necessary.
 
as a customer and NOT a webtechdeveloperhtmlcssjoomla(whateverthatis)guru - I personally would never select a supplier to do ANY work for me on an hourly rate basis - "fixed price for the job" is fairer (from a clients perspective) and the norm for us - probably the flavour of things to come bearing in mind the current "state of the nation" and all that!

I think that the days of the hourly rate and "open chequebook" are dead!

khushy
 
as a customer and NOT a webtechdeveloperhtmlcssjoomla(whateverthatis)guru - I personally would never select a supplier to do ANY work for me on an hourly rate basis - "fixed price for the job" is fairer (from a clients perspective) and the norm for us - probably the flavour of things to come bearing in mind the current "state of the nation" and all that!

If you are developing any bespoke stuff, work it out as multiples of your daily rate, but be careful because most customers want a fixed price for a specified project. Any over-runs will generally come out of your time.
 
Out of interest, could we have some links to websites that have been charged at £100 per hour? I am curious to see the standard that justifies this kind of £££?

We charge nowhere near that and the work we do is of a decent competitive level so i'm thinking one of 3 things is happening:

• you guys are heavily over charging
• we are heavily under charging
• you are in london maybe where the game is different?

I have had many clients who admit we are charging a little more than their other quotes, but who like the standard of our portfolio and will go with us... I know for a fact if I pushed the price up to the kind of levels you guys are talking, we simply wouldn't win any contracts.

so... can we see some URLs?
 
:confused: The amount my company charges does not need to be justified as by all accounts the values are sensible... otherwise we all might as well post up sites... we want to see these high flying ones.

Didn't reply cuz I thought you were on my side also wishing to see the same sites i requested... then you went and turned on me! - but yes, I was maybe a bit hasty...
 
:confused: The amount my company charges does not need to be justified as by all accounts the values are sensible... otherwise we all might as well post up sites... we want to see these high flying ones.

Didn't reply cuz I thought you were on my side also wishing to see the same sites i requested... then you went and turned on me! - but yes, I was maybe a bit hasty...

ok cool but i'd like to see some of your sites to compare, thats of course if it is possible, not because you have made them up but because you are sworn to secrecy by your company (you know what i mean).
 
So for Third Sector (charity/non-profit) you'll be looking at rates of £300-£400 per day, in the private sector you will be looking at £500-£750 typically, and if you have a niche skill or are working for 'platinum' clients, you might charge £750-£2000.
Seriously, what exactly were you smoking when you came up with those figures?

As I said earlier in the thread, I work with agencies (30+ people fulltime, then freelancers) who don't charge over £100 an hour. Thinking it's the norm to be charging that as an individual just isn't at all realistic.
 
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