Hi there,

 

I am beginner freelance web designer though I have done more than 25 website projects in last 6 months. I have always struggled with the price of the website. I charge roughly £300 for wordpress driven websites with maximum five pages.

Some of my customers had pictures taken themselves with their own cameras (not good quality jpegs ) and few times by the professional photographers. Most of the times, I got the pictures from websites that offer the licenses for the pictures for free to use on commercial projects. I have used the free subscriptions on the paid websites to keep the clients happy and Now i am fully exhausted to keep doing the same thing over and over again. It is quite painful and sometimes can be illegal to mine the pictures for commercial projects.

Plus, I am rather in the business of website design not in the business to collect the pictures which in reality takes more time than developing websites.

 

The main problem is that my clients can not afford to buy pictures from the stock photography websites and I am not getting enough customers a month so I can't afford myself to keep the subscription running for whole month. If I buy the pictures seperately from the stock websites then I will have to increase the price; which my clients would not like to pay.

I think there will be some people who are experienced web designers who must have found a solution to this problem. I will really appreciate if somebody can suggest the solution to the problem that I am facing.

 

Thanks in advance

explain to your clients that your time costs and if you have to go looking for images then they will have to pay for your time, or pay for stock images. images from stock photo places aren't all that expensive - if you clients can't budget for it then they have an unrealistic budget - having a website as a markteing and sales tool is an essential part of their business, not some low cost add-on.

explain to your clients that your time costs and if you have to go looking for images then they will have to pay for your time, or pay for stock images. images from stock photo places aren't all that expensive - if you clients can't budget for it then they have an unrealistic budget - having a website as a markteing and sales tool is an essential part of their business, not some low cost add-on.

As above really. Any stock images need to be factored in to the cost of the project, or provided by the client.

 

Every hour spent 'looking' for free to use images, is an hour out of your day that somebody needs to pay you for.

 

I am presuming, from the figures you provided, that you are simply using premium (or free) themes for these websites? If not, you really need to rethink your costs, as £300 would be way to cheap for a bespoke design/build.

it also means that you're on about 15 grand a year which if you're full time isn't very much...

Maybe go here: http://www.pexels.com/ search for any photo even vaguely related to the subject they need and don't spend too long looking for the perfect one. Use that and tell them it's a place holder, and suggest they find their own one from somewhere like here: http://www.dreamstime.com/ for the live site.

it also means that you're on about 15 grand a year which if you're full time isn't very much...

 

I agree £300 for a 5 page site with a CMS is insanely cheap.

Sourcing images from a stockist is usually a bad idea as most have been seen and commercially used before, giving the company the completely wrong impression.

 

If they cannot afford to give you decent quality images, why is that your problem? You need to keep hold of a certain standard otherwise people will think that's how you work and don't know any better.

 

£300.00 for a Wordpress site? That is probably around the same price I might charge to grab a pre made theme, throw their logo on it and change one or two things around (although I would never do that), that is not "web design" that is simply throwing an unsuitable piece of work up and hoping people might buy something, if that was the case you would be better off offering a suitable a4 size poster as your website.

Sourcing images from a stockist is usually a bad idea as most have been seen and commercially used before, giving the company the completely wrong impression.

 

If they cannot afford to give you decent quality images, why is that your problem? You need to keep hold of a certain standard otherwise people will think that's how you work and don't know any better.

 

Also, In some cases, you don't have any choice but to hire a professional photographer. If our hotel clients used stock photography, or camera phone images, they wouldn't get a single online booking.

 

£300 for a CMS website? Really, in 2014? That's stupidly cheap.

 

It's around 20% more than someone on UK minimum wage will earn for a 38 hour week. As the OP is probably in India or close to it then £300 is not a bad earner, it's all relative to the local cost of living of course.

 

Locally here in South Wales someone was offering a 5 page Wordpress site for £50 a pop a couple of years ago.