I used to freelance, and moved onto fulltime, and it did not involve a single agency, infact I didn't even need to leave my house. www.sitepoint.com, www.freelancers.net, and others for work. Had me earning £100+ ph on some jobs. I had a set price of £500 for a typical e-shop setup, which I would have done in less than 5 hours with ease. You are referring to contracting, not freelancing.
web design cost?
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I used to freelance, and moved onto fulltime, and it did not involve a single agency, infact I didn't even need to leave my house. www.sitepoint.com, www.freelancers.net, and others for work. Had me earning £100+ ph on some jobs. I had a set price of £500 for a typical e-shop setup, which I would have done in less than 5 hours with ease. You are referring to contracting, not freelancing.
*yawn* let me guess, one of these "completey from scratch hand crafted and kissed by the angels" developers?
If what I used to do satisfies the requirements, why should they need the above? Good developers will do exactly enough to satisfy the requirements and nothing more.
Why reinvent the wheel for every customer, if they all want CMS and eCommerce, why should I rehash the same thing a thousand times?
I'm not referring to contracting at all, agencies use freelancers all the time. Most will have a bank of many to choose from, and regularly call back in the ones they get good results out of. You're thinking of employment agencies, they're something different.
And yes, you went from freelancing earning £100+ an hour to fulltime...the very fact you moved into fulltime work shows that you weren't a very successful freelancer tbh.
And I'm not saying you can't get jobs earning £100+, but just because they exist, doesn't mean it's anywhere near an average hourly rate. I'm a fulltime freelance developer, and I assure you that you can't expect to earn those sorts of rates on a regular basis.
Not completely from scratch, just a professional quality to it. Good professional websites can easily take a week of work just to get a design signed off, that's before I even start my part of the process. Then once that's done, just to get a design into a HTML/CSS template will take more than 5 hours for a decent site. Then there's the actual development.
5 hours is just laughable for anything slightly bespoke.
Did I mention bespoke anywhere? I said most sites, not all 
Hence my mentioning of templates (pre-made) and existing CMS etc. If Jim's Spanners Shop just wants an eShop with a template, why would I create an entirely bespoke site? £500 for a site to Jim is not a lot, and will very quickly repay its self.
I went from £100+ph jobs, of about 15-20hours regular employment a week, +set pieces like Jim's shop, to fulltime salaried work. I was bored of job (and money in some cases) chasing, and working on my own.
edit: Although, the last time I took on a freelance job was nearly two years ago. I understand the market to be less fruitful. A few friends have whinged once or twice about the freelance market, particularly the lack of Jim's Shop jobs. However the hourly rate of £100 is easily achievable, it's just a very insecure job as I'm sure you'll agree.
Hence my mentioning of templates (pre-made) and existing CMS etc. If Jim's Spanners Shop just wants an eShop with a template, why would I create an entirely bespoke site? £500 for a site to Jim is not a lot, and will very quickly repay its self.I went from £100+ph jobs, of about 15-20hours regular employment a week, +set pieces like Jim's shop, to fulltime salaried work. I was bored of job (and money in some cases) chasing, and working on my own.
edit: Although, the last time I took on a freelance job was nearly two years ago. I understand the market to be less fruitful. A few friends have whinged once or twice about the freelance market, particularly the lack of Jim's Shop jobs. However the hourly rate of £100 is easily achievable, it's just a very insecure job as I'm sure you'll agree.
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Right, so you posted in a thread asking how much to charge for design & development...why?Did I mention bespoke anywhere? I said most sites, not all
So you were button clicking for a living then? That's not developing anything. It also doesn't work unless Jim knew the hourly rate you were charging. It's easy to get high hourly rates with fixed price jobs, do you think Jim would agree to paying you £100 an hour?
Well done for getting a few £100+ph jobs, but that still doesn't mean it's in any way indicitive of the average.
Good freelancers don't have to chase work, I'm busy all the time, I've never had to advertise or chase work, I've done 4 years fulltime & another 5+ part time before that all on repeat business & reccomendations.
And you thought the only alternative was to get a fulltime salaried job?
Again, £100ph on fixed price jobs is achievable, £100 as an agreed hourly rate is very rare, especially out of London. This isn't just a recent thing.
To give a basis .. if £100ph is achievable for a simple install and setup, then.. you can work out the rest.
Captain extremo, to the assumption! Read my post again.
Most of my jobs were £100+. Only if they were going to be a significant amount of time (weeks-months long) would I have considered lowering my price.
Pat on the back for you. I only had to chase jobs in the sense of getting the ball rolling. Plenty of times customers would sign for work, then for whatever reason things would pause, and I'd have to put the fire up the backside to get it rolling again. As for chasing money, it was just the typical 'delayed payments'.
er, did I say it was?
Then I must have been very rare, as well as the others I regularly conversed with on forums like sitepoint. Some of my jobs were US based, and I was getting $180ph agreed rates.
But you're talking about a different job, and you're still ignoring the point that most fixed price clients wouldn't agree if they knew the hourly rate you were actually expecting.
Captain extremo? Make your mind up, you're the one who's said you're using a pre-built CMS/eCom and pre-made template, where exactly is the development happening?
Was this really such a big part of your job? I can't remember the last time I had to push a client to get things moving, it's usually them trying to push me for unrealistic deadlines. Getting payment doesn't take too much effort either.
Well it's the option you chose. It just seems strange to me that you'd take such a massive pay cut if you thought there was an alternative.
Well I can't argue with it, and I know there is the odd job out there for these rates. But out of about 8 digital agencies I work for/have worked for in Leeds, only one of them charges above £100 an hour to clients. I just find it extremely unlikely that every job you did was for above agency rates.
Who said I took a pay cut? 
I said some of my work was installs. On the grand scheme of things, freelance work is little else. You'll get the odd tweak here and there, and perhaps some actually development of functionality that doesn't exist, but for Joe Schmo shop it's just like any other, with a template style applied.
The mass majority (90%+) of my jobs was at that rate. However, most jobs didn't last longer than 3 5-6 hour days so the rate was high(er) because of this. Jobs that lasted a week or more were charged at a reduction, but no lower than £60ph.
I said some of my work was installs. On the grand scheme of things, freelance work is little else. You'll get the odd tweak here and there, and perhaps some actually development of functionality that doesn't exist, but for Joe Schmo shop it's just like any other, with a template style applied.
The mass majority (90%+) of my jobs was at that rate. However, most jobs didn't last longer than 3 5-6 hour days so the rate was high(er) because of this. Jobs that lasted a week or more were charged at a reduction, but no lower than £60ph.
Well it's pointless continuing this tbh. I've been asking all the freelancers I know on IRC/MSN etc... Out of about 40 replies so far, not one person believes what you're saying. Everyone has confirmed what I've been saying, you can get the odd job on high rates, but it's rare, certainly not the norm.Who said I took a pay cut?
I said some of my work was installs. On the grand scheme of things, freelance work is little else. You'll get the odd tweak here and there, and perhaps some actually development of functionality that doesn't exist, but for Joe Schmo shop it's just like any other, with a template style applied.
The mass majority (90%+) of my jobs was at that rate. However, most jobs didn't last longer than 3 5-6 hour days so the rate was high(er) because of this. Jobs that lasted a week or more were charged at a reduction, but no lower than £60ph.
I still maintain that we have differing definitions on what freelancing actually is. To me what you are doing is like temping, you're pulled in by an agency to fill a job role on a temporary basis. This will always have reduced rates compared to what I refer to as freelancing which is basically a one man outsource.
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The inland revenue seem to be quite observant on the 2 types of freelancer you're talking about there Dj_Jestar. Being as I'm not a designer, I'm (my company is) contacted by project managers looking to get all the development work done on a particular site/project that's been outsourced to them. The 5-minute "Joe Schmo shop" type job isn't what I enjoy doing, and it's not what I chase. I tend to go after bigger jobs that require me to get my hands dirty and do something a little more than just install, click, click £500 please. That does, however, involve taking a bit of a pay cut in terms of hourly rate, but I don't mind because I'm doing the work I want to do and I'm getting paid what I need.
Dj_Jestar is correct, though - due to the whole IR35 thing, a lot of "freelancers" are considered as contractors as far as HMRC are concerned, and you have to be pretty careful about how you conduct your business, otherwise you could get taxed quite heavily. This is one of the reasons all of the work I take on is internally managed (by me: boring) and I tick a few other boxes, like working from my own office, terms and conditions drawn up, business insurance, that sort of thing. It's a pain in the head when all I really want to be doing is making sites!
Dj_Jestar is correct, though - due to the whole IR35 thing, a lot of "freelancers" are considered as contractors as far as HMRC are concerned, and you have to be pretty careful about how you conduct your business, otherwise you could get taxed quite heavily. This is one of the reasons all of the work I take on is internally managed (by me: boring) and I tick a few other boxes, like working from my own office, terms and conditions drawn up, business insurance, that sort of thing. It's a pain in the head when all I really want to be doing is making sites!
freelance (frē'lăns')
1. A person who sells services to employers without a long-term commitment to any of them.
You clearly don't even know what a freelancer is. Most agencies will maintain a "freelancers" list, does every agency in the country use a wrong definition of freelance too?
I also work almost 100% from home these days, only really going out for meetings, hardly ever working on-site. My hourly rates for working on-site are normally higher though, not lower.
You clearly have problems with reading comprehension. Firstly, I did not state that mine is correct and yours is wrong, only that we have differing opinions, and secondly, both of my 'definitions' fit the dictionary definition - only with differing levels of granularity. A Contractor fits the dictionary definition of Freelancer, yet earlier you claimed they are entirely different, as did I.
I don't have any problems with reading comprehension, you just keep changing your story.
I never said a contractor can't be a freelancer too, you did
And yes, both of your definitions fit the dictionary definition...but again, you're the one that said someone working on-site wasn't a freelancer. Where did I claim they were entirely different?entirely should not have been used in my last reply. They have differences. If someone introduced themselves as a Contractor, and another as a Freelancer you'd immediately know there are differences.
My "story" has not changed.
My "story" has not changed.
Do you really want to continue this? You're contradicting yourself in almost every post.
By correcting myself I am now contradicting?
It's simple: I freelanced and regularly made £100ph on agreed rates, that were non fixed timescale/price jobs, but also took on fixed price jobs (setups/installs) when things were quiet. We could bicker till the cows come home, but that fact will not change. Neither will the fact that the majority of jobs, in the entire market, are setups and/or (re)installs that require minimal development, but knowledge of existing software.
It's simple: I freelanced and regularly made £100ph on agreed rates, that were non fixed timescale/price jobs, but also took on fixed price jobs (setups/installs) when things were quiet. We could bicker till the cows come home, but that fact will not change. Neither will the fact that the majority of jobs, in the entire market, are setups and/or (re)installs that require minimal development, but knowledge of existing software.
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Well this discussion has progressed a bit...
I'm a business owner, a contractor and a freelancer at the same time. It depends on the day as to the role I'm playing and therefore the rates I'm charging. Not to stoke things but £100+/hour is common but is by no means the norm.
I'm a business owner, a contractor and a freelancer at the same time. It depends on the day as to the role I'm playing and therefore the rates I'm charging. Not to stoke things but £100+/hour is common but is by no means the norm.