Author Website Design: How Much?

A good website will take far more than two hours to create. I'd guess that most decent websites cost anywhere from mid four figures to ???.

If the site is good, the value is in the thousands, not the hundreds, but there's a lot to it . . . search engine ranking, ease of loading, appearance

Maryn, for an amateur attempt, I'd suggest a round figure of $100 and being prepared to negotiate around that. The kid has skills your friend doesn't, and the price should reflect that. It would cost a lot more to have it done professionally.

A lot depends on how confident your daughter is in producing a final result, how she values it and how much your friend is willing to pay.

I agree that for anything more than a very basic site, it's likely to take longer than 2/3 hours.

One of the regrettable evils that goes along with a web site is maintaining that web site after the fact. Is The Kid willing to be on-call for emergency repairs in the future?

I am speaking from personal experience.

Don't let her low-ball her price so much that it's a steal. That can lead to other problems. (Such as her time being worth less than anyone else's, and the other person making extra demands) Price it fairly - per hour or per project. Ten dollars an hour is way too low, even for a novice.

Don't start anything without a written agreement of some sort. Not getting each sides' obligations, restrictions, expectations, promises, etc. can lead to your daughter getting called every day or so to make "adjustments" or add this or that forever. That becomes a nightmare. Define exactly what your daughter will do. (how many revisions, how much additional info after what date...)

Also consider the upkeep. Who will be the one adding new info to the site and how ready will the content be that your daughter needs to put up? Is it written for search engine optimization? Will it need to be? What about keywords and such?

These are all important things to consider.

Good luck!

Best to spell out an actual contract -- great thing for a kid to learn, BTW. So, make it X hours at $Y/hour, for a specific list of outcomes. Also spell out any incremental payments & their benchmarks.

Basic HTML is fairly cheap. When the designer has to start putting in functions ("open new browser window" being one of the simplest), there should be more cash.

Make sure that the site owner has rights to all illustrations, & any specified nonstandard fonts used on the site.

Graphic designs should be charged for & bought outright, since a site owner had better buy them from the site designer, or risk getting locked out of her own logotype!!

(Get an outside reviewer, because far too many amateurs truly believe that tiny squiggly violet letters on a black background is not a good but a GREAT idea.)

My website was designed by Mike Coombes, who is an AW member and specializes in author websites, and yes, this is a shameless plug for him! His charges are very reasonable and he has been helping me with all kinds of problems ever since at no extra charge. I suggest you contact him for advice, via his website Kissing the Frog

Do you have some sites that you like or admire? You could always contact the author and ask who did theirs and get estimates that way.

When I was the creative director for an ad agency, we charged anywhere from $10k to $50k for a site. These were dynamic data-base driven sites, often with loads of custom programming and hundreds of pages. They were pricey, but slick and highly functional.

I use Squarespace for mine, and it's cheap and easy to customize. It could be a more comprehensive site, I just don't feel the need right now, but I highly recommend it as a platform. (As opposed to Blogger, WordPress or Live Journal).

I've created basic templates that are perfectly FINE in two hours-- including custom graphics.

I've charged as little as 50 bucks for a simple template, and as much as a thousand for a more involved, layered site.

I made mine myself, called it Cyber-Soup, been around since 9-99' it's just what you might expect, all kinds of things I feel deeply about.

http://cyber-soup.com

Love to see what you think of it.

You could go with a template, if all you need is something simple. My website is a modified version of Wordpress and suits my needs pretty well.

My website cost $500 - and my web guy charges about $90/hr. He's not bad, but I'm not really happy with him for other reasons. When I priced around, I found the average was about $400-$500 - but what the packages included was different.

Ah, well I do some technical posting and help my friend out and he hosts my website for me. We've been friends forever it seems. Back to 1999, that was before I wanted to make a website, and posting on a technical support board for my first website at a webhost called 50megs.com, I met my good buddy Chris on their tech support forum. He's read all my work, he's one good friend I do talk writing to who's not a writer in that way. Chris is a writer of code, he created a message board software that works awesomely and I help on the tech support forums for it which is always easy, things run smoothly on that network.

We basically had a board at EzBoard back when it was still cool to be there, and when they were slow giving us features, we went ahead and made our own board network, You can easily make yor own site, you just need to know what you want it to look like. I helped design core features of this network and so I have my site hosted with my friend's network. It's amazing how many cool features people could come up with, and how easily Chris brought them to life.

I think my little website is nicely done for it's age, no flashy stuff, just content. LOL!

HI Maryn, Getting a web site might turn out to involve much more than just the expense of having it built. If you have a professional company design your web site they are probably going to want or even require you to have hosting through them, which means ongoing expenses that you should be prepared for. Another problem with having a site professionally built is that you are dependent on the designer for any changes or modifications, next week or in three years. You will probably be charged hourly fees for this work. So you might pay $4-$5000 for the site to be built, but the expenses hardly end there.

If you have the funds and it's worth the investment that may be the way to go. I had someone who presented himself as a web expert build my Phila area singlers site out of a template that he recommended, and it has been a nightmare. That's because the template was over his head since he was a designer and wasn't versed on back-end scripting and other tech changes that turned out to be required months into the project. By then I had sunk so much money into it that it seemed too late to turn back. The original fee was going to be $1000 but it has required lots of regular draining expenses as he modified things I could not do, and cost more like $3000. And all this after my one specification: That I did not want to be dependent on his services, but wanted to be able to work the site myself. www.miniminglers.com

I built my personal site myself with Microsoft Publisher. It has no bells or whistles, just simple links. I think my "home" links on the inside pages don't work so I need to fix them. It only took about two hours and since I have no money it was the way to go for now. It's an informational site so I don't need discussion forums, comments and that sort of thing. www.pollykahl.com

My advice is just check all the options, and find out what the long term financial and time consequences of each choice might be. Good luck to you and I hope you end up loving your site.

I'm working through this right now. I want a fairly simple one, so I'm expecting to pay between $1000-$1500 -- and I am paying a professional to do it. There are other bells and whistles I might pony up more for, depending on how much backing I think HC is going to give my series. This appears to be pretty much what my published friends have paid, too.

Pamster said:

I made mine myself, called it Cyber-Soup, been around since 9-99' it's just what you might expect, all kinds of things I feel deeply about.

http://cyber-soup.com

Love to see what you think of it.

Click to expand...

You might want to be aware, Pam, that MacAfee is telling me to run away from your website, fast, because of the popup and about a dozen different tracking cookies. If you didn't intend those to be there, it might be worth looking at.
It kind of put me off looking around very much.

Ah, that would be the web counter tracker, sorry it's telling you to stay away, I don't think there should be any popups other then the poetry, java pops into its own minipage. Thanks for letting me know Jenan Mac.

ETA: I don't see any pop ups at all from my site, are you sure you were on my site? It's not to pop anything up but to open pages in new windows, or java pap them to their own miniwindows.

I designed both my personal and Ezine sites (which at some point 'll change again) for the cost of learning how, buying Dreamweaver MX, and having a designer/illustrator background to boot.

I am my own webmaster on both. A good starting point is $250 and go freom there. Depending on complexity of site; e.g. flash movies, javascript, upkeep and updating, hosting cost which the author foots and the webmaster can suggest hosts that are reasonably priced.

Websites can take a loooong time to build, but are fun to do IMO.

My husband does websites for politicians over in Austria, and he charges 150 for the design and 50 euros a month for upkeep. He keeps their news/blogs/etc up to date. I'm not sure if that helps at all, but thought I'd throw it out there.

-Note these people are friends of his from childhood

My web designer, Black Panther Studios, has now done a total of 6 websites for my various businesses.

My personal website, www.ericfogle.com, which is obviously used for my novel cost $325. I believe it was around $35/hour, plus upkeep. I personally feel this website is nails (baseball term for kick-arse) for the money I spent.

And, she charged around $875 for this website, www.sunmarksports.com.

She is now working on a website that should cost around $3k, for the portion of my company that deals with bio-swales, engineered soils, eco-roofs, and streamback restoration systems.

Now, none of the listed websites are highly complex...the latter being moreso because of its very basic shopping cart. Saying that, I use her on everything...because she is a.) professional b.) timely and c.) can keep my sites elegant, but easy to navigate.

PS - My examples aren't meant to pimp her...or send people to those sites. I simply wanted to give Maryn some price tagged examples to look at.