Dear all,

 

I have recently completed a website for two friends of mine for their business and now need to charge them but I am not sure how much/what is fair. The website consists of 19 pages, there have been approximately four visits to their house, of around an hour each, other work includes setting up a contact form, making a jquery menu and converting doc. files to pdf's to download. All title tags and descriptions have also been included.

 

I realise some designers charge per project, some per hour and some per page so I wonder if anyone could advise, given the work I carried out, what would be a fair price. I do not want to overcharge but at the same time I don't want to sell myself short.

 

Any help is always appreciated.

 

Many thanks!

did you not agree a price before you started?

It's always easier to agree a price/rate before you start work.

 

The price will normally depend on lots of different factors such as:

• The quality of your work
  
• Your experience
  
• The length of time you have to do the project
  
• Who the project is for
  

 

It's hard for anybody to tell you how much to charge.

 

For a project like that I would charge anywhere from £400 to £1000.

How long is a piece of string?

 

Some designers will charge £100 some will charge £10000; you cannot put a RRP on websites unfortunately.

 

You will just have to chat to your friends and agree a price based on what you think your time was worth.

 

If you want a very rough guide; take the amount of hours it took you and multiply that by £15 and then add £100 for good luck

 

(eg. 50hrs x £15 + £100 = £850)

 

That is a very rough guide though - £15 an hour is a reasonable mates rate to be honest

Assuming you designed the site as part of that, I'd normally charge between £800 and £1k for a 20 page website. Of course it depends on the client (I'd charge a lot more for a large corporation compared to a freelance photographer for example) and how good you are at what you do. For a friend I'd be thinking closer to the £600-£700 mark.

 

As Darren says though, you should have agreed a price beforehand. The client might be shocked when you tell them how much it is.

Thank you everyone for your help.

 

I agree yes a price should have been agreed but at the time it was a little difficult as they had no idea of what they wanted going into it and how many pages. For example I wouldnt want to say 600 and it turn out to be only 5 pages and likewise if it then turned out to be 50 pages then a set fee isnt really reflective of the hours put in.

 

When we first started they said is it going to be about a thousand and I said definitely lower, last we spoke I said between 450 and 500 but since then I have had to add trhee more pages and do two more visits (obviously time out of my working day.)

 

I guess I was really after a guideline rough price that a freelance would charge per hour so I had some idea of a region to charge.

 

Thank you for you assistance though everyone.

I don't personally have an hourly rate really. I could design two sites with identical briefs and one could take half the time of the other. Sometimes design just works, others you could be wrestling with a project for days and it's not fair for the client to have to pay for that.

 

Have a read of this article

Interesting article, thank you for sharing that.

 

As I don't do this sort of thing very often, I wasn't sure how freelancers tend to charge. I have read that per page is an unfair way, as one page could be full of complicated script and the other just a few lines of text and it is not fair to charge the same price for both.

 

Given the prices people have guestimated at, I think around 500 is fair. I dont feel like I have over or under charged with that figure.

 

I thank you all for your help in this matter.

i suggest £400 to £1000.

A Picasso painting is worth £millions but if I was to paint the something similar it wouldnt be worth cleaning your ass with. Pricing is all dependent on you. How much do you think your skills are worth. Dont base a price on how long it takes you. If your good at a skill you will get faster at it. So why should you charge on time. That way a year eariler you might have charged more because you were not as skilled at a particular area.

I charge on what I think my skills are worth. It has taken me years to learn the skills and gain the knowledge I have. Freelancers often under estimate themselves. If an agency was to take on a 19 page site I would say they would be pricing around £5000 at least. This months .net magazine has a great article on how to work out the price to charge.