What is a good price to design a 3 or 4 page website? I'm looking for good prices to charge people,,,

Do you plan to do this for a living or just as a side gig for fun?
How long will it take you to build?
What technology is it using?
What is the average rate for someone of your skill in your area deploying a similar design?
What is the time frame, budget, and goals of the site design?

There are too many variables with the information you give. Maybe show some examples of your work and/or examples of what you aim to do with some more detail some of the guys here can help.

But in general you want to ask a fair price. Depending on your skill level, speed, and local market pricing will vary. There is a post in this forum from the other day asking the same question that has some usefull links. Just scroll down some :)

Don't charge low rates. You will regret it.

Hello,

The best way to charge your client if you got no idea what to charge is to ask a simple question to your client:

"What is your budget?"

Often, you will be surprised by the answer.

Try the "Ron Popeil" approach...
"You would expect to pay $10,000... but not here!"
"It is a great value at $3,500 but for you..."
"For 'word of mouth' advertising we'll give it to you for $1000 off"

Or the cable-tv approach...
The website is $xxxx
The hosting is $xx/mo (yes, at least 2 x's)
The business cards are $xxx
The letterhead is $xxx
The brochures are $xxx

Bundle them all together for "one low price" (that is actualy pretty fair). Add value by increasing deliverables that are coordinated with the new website look.

For a site I charge from $40-$200. It all depends on the time spent and how much someone is willing to pay, your best bet is to ask for their budget.

200-300 is just fine...gotta be quality design though.

Cheers,
Jan

Originally posted by foress
Hello,

The best way to charge your client if you got no idea what to charge is to ask a simple question to your client:

"What is your budget?"

Often, you will be surprised by the answer.

You can say that again. Most of the time its "$5".

:eek:

Depends on what is involved. A simple 4 page design that contains just HTML and a few graphics could be like 5 dollars then if you get involved in huge projects that are mysql and PHP and take a month to do then I would charge 2000$ Depending on length, quality, type of code it will be done in, and graphics, like flash or just regular jpegs.

In my opinion, any hosting template is not worth $5 if it's any good, especially when they contact a web designer for such product.

Cheers,
Josh

Originally posted by JasonSCSN
then if you get involved in huge projects that are mysql and PHP and take a month to do then I would charge 2000$

You would only charge $2000 for a PHP/MySQL site that takes a month to do? I may need to PM you about some potential work ;)

If you only charge $2k for 1mo work you may want to consider upping your rate if you do good work because you are not making much per hour:

160hrs (1mo.) * $12.50/hr = $2,000.00

Throw in your hardware and software costs (and any office management expenses that are not billable), plus taxes and other fees and you would not be making much--plus you would be taking on risk.

I am not trying to be critical (maybe you do not live in the US or are living at home so I am assuming a lot), but I would think if you could make a decent MySQL/PHP site and the project took a month of work then your time is worth more than $2,000. $12.50/hr for a PHP/MySQL driven site seems really cheap. If you can communicate well with clients and do quality work then you should get paid well ;)

Obviously there are a lot of variables that go into pricing (market, ability, time, supply/demand, your costs and goals, etc...) so please do not take my comments as being critical. Take them as me saying I think you are worth more than $12.50/hr ;)

For the original poster:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/web-work-should-charge

There is also a discussion here about this same subject:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=377237

If you do a google search on "website design billing" or the like you should get some good links. It seems most webdesigners seem to charge $50-$65 starting off if they have a good skill set. Obviously having a good porfolio and good word of mouth are important, so sometimes you may have to do some quality jobs on the cheap (or maybe not), just don't sell yourself short. There are some good guides on helping you price your work (e.g. looking at overhead, billable hours, etc...) and I would suggest searching some of those.

Good luck!

I second what Acert93 has said. $2,000 for a PHP/MySQL project over one month's time is just not enough.

Many web developers (not even designers) get paid well over $100 an hour for their work if the quality of the application is good enough. You may want to look over your prices if you do this sort of work. Check www.salary.com for the base salary, divide that by the number of hours you would work in a year, and that is your base price. Lets just say that I work at the base salary of $83,000 a year as a web software developer (with say 3-5 years experience) for a total number of billable hours at 1900. That would bring my bare minimum hourly rate at $44!

Now what you do is, if you lease office space or have any office costs to settle, you will want to add around 10-15% to that number. You can say I lease office space downtown, so I add 15% to $44 and that brings me to $51.

If you own a company, you of course are going to want to have a profitable business, and you will want to put money into it and keep it going. You are going to have a 20% profit margin, so that you can invest in XYZ Developers, Inc. This will bring your total hourly rate to $61.

You have to pay for hardware, software, phones, internet, a premium WHT subscription (hehe) and many other related costs of owning a business. Add another 30% and you are now to a grand total of around $80 per hour. And this is with only 3-5 years of experience in whatever language you specialize in.

Your homework: guess how much you would make knowing web design, another language or two and Internet marketing. You see why you should never limit your prices, and always charge by an hourly rate? You are well worth it.

Cheers,
Josh

You have to be careful about what you charge. A company may tell you that they need a small website, and then send you a check, then you start the work, then you may easily put 20-30 hours in it before you know it. I have a story behind this hahah... I told a business that I would design their website for $200... BOY WAS THAT A MISTAKE.. the business had over 50 pages worth of FULL content, lots of graphics, etc... but I couldn't raise the price because he had already cut me a check and I didn't know it was going to be that much work. You have to have SET packages and SET prices. Don't design quality websites for cheap.. you WILL regret it, just like RMF said... Good luck... Let us know what you come up with.

One of the ways I price a design job is to look at the scope of the whole project, then I come up with a per page price, a price per graphic/image and figure out a price per custom script. If the script is a difficult one I complete the rest of the site and then charge hourly for the scripting.

It has worked for me. Getting the true feel of the scope of the project before commiting a price, allows me to quote competitively while not underselling myself.

I hope this helps a bit.