Cheers Guys for not giving us a complete pasting!
Hydrant is my company and whilst I can't say I agree with everything above, it's nice to know that those people saying our prices are 'fair' are about equal to those saying they're not.
Yes we charge between £300 and £400 per day and we don't ever claim to be the cheapest around, we make enough to pay our staff fairly and operate sustainably but we also aren't the most expensive by a long shot. We don't deny that there are freelancers who do what we do for less per hour / day. But the number of clients we take over when 'friends' or freelancers just disappear or get full time jobs and are unable to answer queries in business hours, to me justifies our business model and pricing. My 5 core staff are employed on full time contacts so get to know clients and are there to help improve and develop sites over time, rather than the one off 'budget' service to build a site and leave the clients without ongoing advice or input to develop their site further over time.
In response to the portfolio comments : you'll notice not all of the links pasted above are on our own website portfolio whilst they are all out sites and we're not ashamed of that, they represent a wide cross section of clients and projects over a 2-3 year period. Some more successful than others and I defy any web designer to be 100% happy with every single project they've worked on as budget and client requirements and attitude do ultimately impact how things look and feel especially with larger public sector ones.
We are very happy to say we use Drupal and other open source CMSs, they are great tools and allow us to operate this type of service. We never 'sell' open source software, but we have no shame in charging for our time to configure and setup what are still relatively technical systems for business people who have no interest or time to learn, design and configure them themselves.
I'll defy anyone to find one of our sites re-using a free template with just a logo or colour scheme change. They are all coded from scratch usually following a face to face design consultancy process which is focused on clear communication and brand building (we are a graphic design company too). However anyone who thinks the design process can be endless until the client is 'happy' has little respect for the role of a professionally qualified designer both in terms of their advice and impact on financial / relationship sustainability - we don't just design what we think looks 'nice' or will keep the client 'happy'.
RE: the comment about the Reddot CMS site - that's not one we're responsible for I'm pleased to say! in fact we've never actually done any development for them, we have however carried out consultancy work recently for that client concerning how to improve the site and some open source alternatives to using Reddot.
Finally the thawny issue of hosting fees. Again for the record I feel we and many other small web companies face this price challenge on a daily basis. Yes we resell hosting, yes we have to charge more than you can buy hosting for online - we do know that. However to a business owner / manager who has other important tasks on their plate every day, an extra £50, £100 or even £200 per year for the peace of mind for someone else to react if their site goes down is in my opinion a small price to pay. In fact when you include the time sending emails, sorting the odd glitch etc we don't actually 'make' that much money on hosting. Its for that reason that we happily take on clients who want to arrange their hosting themselves. The only thing we do make clear to these people is that we aren't the first people to call if your site stops working because we then end up investigating the problem (which is usually with the server config) for no money which as everyone knows is unsustainable.
Hope that presents our side of the story fairly.
BTW - I believe the original poster has decided to go with us so thanks all for giving a balanced response and not deterring him.
Cheers,
Leo
http://www.hydrant.co.uk
