What should I think about in website design?

This is a hard question to answer as I have seen a similar spread of values as you have and they are no indicator of quality. I have seen some so called professionally designed websites that companies have paid a fortune for and all the 'professional' seems to do is bung in as many bells and whistles as they can, making the site a mess and hard to load. I've also seen amateur ones that are beautiful and done for free.

Knowing people who work in crafting fields and how they price themselves I could offer the following advice:

- Work out your material costs or upfront costs (do you have to pay anything to start this work? If so that should be added to the overall cost). Mainly applies to 'making something' where, for example, you pay for cost of cloth to make an item of clothing so may not apply here but if they are expecting you to, for example, buy and maintain the domain name then that will have an annual cost.

- Give yourself a reasonable 'hourly pay'. How much do you think your work is worth an hour? How much could you get paid if you were doing another job? For example, I get paid on average £18 - £20 an hour for teaching so if asked to do tuition I may ask for that. But make sure you take into account how skilled the job is when working this out. I would not charge £20 an hour to mow someone's lawn, for example.
- Then, work out how many hours you think it might take to do, work out how much that means you are charging for total time worked and add on any upfront costs.

Present all this information as an itemised bill...

It's actually kind of illegal to discuss pricing structures.

What do you feel you are worth and what do you need to live on. Start there.

Itemize everything. Using a timing program to track your time.

Have a list of specific deliverables; have a list of specific responsibilities, and incorporate it into the contract.

A contract makes it simpler to determine who does what when and for how much.

Include a statement about revisions or new work etc.

IsisAnalysis said:

Or am I overthinking this?

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No; you're not overthinking.

I think you're headed exactly in the right direction.

First, you need to know what they have in mind. If possible, look at some sites with them, in person.

Then work up a list of what the site will have, and some idea of the design elements and who will provide what.

Don't get sucked into providing content for free; either charge a flat hourly rate for writing, or tell them how to send the content to you.

Get the navigation worked out in advance. Whether you charge a flat rate or an hourly rate, keep track of your time, including meetings and planning.

Come up with a plan for a backup as well, and who is responsible for the backup.

IsisAnalysis said:

What do you mean by "get the navigation worked out in advance"? Would that be how one gets around the site and what links to what?

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Yes. Before starting on any site, even a blog:

1. List the pages you want to have up by release: About? Contact? Policies?

2. Navigation--where will you have the navigation menu? What pages are hierarchically subsumed by what pages? What will you call pages? (Remember that names of things in WordPress, for instance, can be URLs.)

3. Where will navigation and other menus be on the site (sidebars, footer, pop-ups)

4. What about metadata--site name, (not the same as domain), site description, tags, categories.

5. What about media ? What kinds of media will be used? Where will it be stored?

6. Widgets or plug-ins for a CMS

7. Domain registration and contacts; who will deal with DNS?

Google: what to ask when building a site

Understand the host's Service Level Agreement (SLA). Uptime, reliability and performance are musts. Security is a must as well and merit a conversation with the hosting service provider.

To clarify a bit more on deliverables...
What they must deliver to you and what you must deliver to them so they can deliver to you.

Know what you want specifically, especially disk space. While that is hard to estimate, tinker with some web page tools and render pages locally, then get their sizes. This is good to know if you have static pages only. If you want a database, get a sense of your space needs as well along with projected growth in terms of disk space consumption by the database. Find out who typically maintains the database in terms of backups and repairs.

Tirjasdyn said:

It's actually kind of illegal to discuss pricing structures

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IsisAnalysis said:

Seriously? Why?

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I looked this up. In the US any discussions about pricing structures between competitors is considered price fixing. And yes, it's against the law.

Cath said:

I looked this up. In the US any discussions about pricing structures between competitors is considered price fixing. And yes, it's against the law.

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But it should be perfectly legal for anyone here who is not a web designer who knows what a lot of them charge to tell you, correct? I mean, my professors tell students what average salaries they can expect in our field in various sectors...

The court would have to prove collusion in the context of price fixing. Moreover, the court would have to prove jurisdiction, for either state or federal charges.

Talking about general practice--or linking to someone else's data--is not price fixing.

There are participants in the discussion who are buyers of services, and not sellers. It is is perfectly legal for buyers or potential buyers to discuss the fees, charges, and rates that suppliers have presented.

Tirjasdyn said:

It's actually kind of illegal to discuss pricing structures.

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Based on your comment and ideas, it would be illegal for a company to post its prices for service on their website since any competitor could see it. Which would mean customers, and potential customers, could not see it either, which is not quite legal either.

From this point of view, business courses that teach you how to price for services would be illegal.

Also, "Writer's Market" usually includes a nice section in the front on helping authors determine normal pricing for there services.

So, are all those (not accurate) salary calculators illegal?

Price fixing is a problem - it requires two, or more, companies to get together and purposely decide to set a price. Of course, in reality, a first company doing business always sets the price, and others follow suit, some lower, some higher, in order to attract customers who think they are getting the best value for their money. Some want the cheapest product, some the most expensive, some in between.



Medievalist - It's okay to ask, and you have received good information here. I used to do website design, and based it on hourly rate, similar to, though less than an hourly rate of the friend who trained me in website design, and lived several hundred mile away.

Be careful of the customers. They seemed to think I was supposed to read their minds to know what their products were, and the prices. One time, they wanted a menu updated. I waited a year to get the updates to post on the website while they grumbled that their website was wrong. I can walk to one of their offices, yet they couldn't get the information to me to update their website.

Likely, I priced myself too low, so they didn't see the value. I even offered them to my friend, who wanted nothing to do with such slow customers. He has plenty of his own. We never discussed what price I was charging, since I was doing simple websites, and he was using Flash, and other programs I was not, so his should be valued at more.

Also, do you have to buy programs for your work on their website? What format will you be using? WordPress, or Dreamweaver to upload? Those can affect rates as well.

I think Dreamweaver, or those other programs can cost several hundred dollars, so if you only do the one website you want to get your money back. Yet if you eventually do more, maybe later you can give the first company a break on costs for a month or two (or a service or two).

Good luck!

adtabb said:

Based on your comment and ideas, it would be illegal for a company to post its prices for service on their website since any competitor could see it. Which would mean customers, and potential customers, could not see it either, which is not quite legal either.

From this point of view, business courses that teach you how to price for services would be illegal.

Also, "Writer's Market" usually includes a nice section in the front on helping authors determine normal pricing for there services.

So, are all those (not accurate) salary calculators illegal?

Price fixing is a problem - it requires two, or more, companies to get together and purposely decide to set a price. Of course, in reality, a first company doing business always sets the price, and others follow suit, some lower, some higher, in order to attract customers who think they are getting the best value for their money. Some want the cheapest product, some the most expensive, some in between.

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Sigh. See Mac's post.

Tirjasdyn said:

Sigh. See Mac's post.

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Given that Mac hasn't posted in this thread, that's pretty hard to do.

Sorry I meant Medievalist. lol

I've been programming and hosting client websites on my own servers for years. Here's some advice:

- Customers don't know what they want until they see it. Build a wireframe/prototype first. Make changes in the wireframe and THEN build out the website. This is how a house is built right? Blueprints...make changes...then build. The farther along the build process you get, the harder (and more expensive) it is to make changes.

- Charge by the hour if you can. Hours tend to sneak up on you, especially when the client makes wholesale changes (see above). If you have to charge by the job, double the number of hours you think it's going to take and start with that many hours times your rate. For example, if you think it will take 40 hours to build the website, charge your rate for 80 hours and go up from there. I've read that a decent designer will charge $2000-3000 for a GOOD design. This is the design only... not building the whole site.

- Small business owners typically undercharge. This causes several problems:

• You attract cheap clients who call you at 2AM to fix a grammar error. Clients who spend $2000+ know it's a business and have more realistic expectations.
• If you aren't compensated adequately, you won't have the same level of interest in the project
• You will get too much low-paying work (remember the supply/demand chart in your economics class??) and you'll spend your time not earning as much as you should

- Make sure you include things like

• Privacy Policy
• Site Map (I use XML Sitemap Generator)
• Contact Us
• Terms of Service
• Add a Copyright notice to the footer
• Use good SEO practices like keyword research and on-page optimization
• Have an optin to build a mailing list

- These days, I tend not to do all of the programming from scratch. 99% of my clients should be using Wordpress. It's not just for blogging. It's great for a small business website too. Advantages of using wordpress are

• There are thousands of themes
• There are thousands of plugins
• There are a LOT of PHP/Wordpress developers and designers so it's easy to find people to work on your web site

- Make sure the website is self-hosted. Don't use http://mydomain.wordpress.com/ because

• You don't have control of the website. The host can take your account offline if THEY want to
• You don't have as much control (you can't install plugins at wordpress.com for example)
• You want to build YOUR brand, not the host (wordpress.com in this example)
• Domain names and shared hosting is VERY affordable. Take it seriously and get your own domain name

Ok... maybe this post got a little out of control...but I do this for a living and I'm passionate about it.