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Since we can't post URLs, do a Google search for "brenner books" and you should see it at the #1 spot.
Please excuse those of us that don't see the correlation.
Your worth should be based upon your worth to the client. That can be anything from nil to several million per year.
Anyone here actually think an Ad Agency charges on a time and materials basis?
Well, wake up folks, a web designer is an Ad Agency and should charge accordingly.
The answer on what to charge is a lttle more than the client is happy with, and a lot less than the client would feel uncorfable with!
The fact is, if someone is at the stage in their career where they're trying to figure out where to price themselves, they're not in the million-dollar-project range. Sure, it's easy to say "price yourself so you're not too high or too low," but you need to give some practical advice as to where that range starts. And using the going rate for a salaried designer (+ about 20%) in a specific area/region is, IMO, a good place to start.
I've hired a number of web design consultants - and for those who worked on an hourly + cost basis, their hourly rates were pretty in line with what I mentioned in message #3 of this thread. I've paid more, and I've paid less. But at least it's a good place to start.
Getting back to the original question, another place for you to look online, createErrorMsg, are the freelance marketplace websites. You can go somewhere like Elance [elance.com] and look at what folks are bidding on various projects. This can give you a general idea of what things may go for in a very competitive situation.
Percentages is right in that "Your worth should be based upon your worth to the client." So you know a small company is probably going to have a smaller budget, whereas a Fortune 100 company may have much more latitude in how they can pay you. But if you don't start with a somewhat reasonable estimate, you may have a hard time getting any jobs to start with.
...using the going rate for a salaried designer (+ about 20%) in a specific area/region is, IMO, a good place to start.
I suspect that if you're going to have an income similar to that salaried designer, you're going to have to charge more than 20% over what they make hourly. That rate assumes a) that you only spend an absolute maximum of just over 16% of your time doing non-billable stuff (which might be wonderful, but is, I think, a little unlikely), and b) that you as an independent have no costs in excess of those that that salaried designer has...
Remember: your client can't get work done by an agency at the rate your hypothetical designer makes.
You can go somewhere like Elance and look at what folks are bidding on various projects. This can give you a general idea of what things may go for in a very competitive situation.
Yes, but only if you want to starve, and work very hard to do it. Given that many competitors on Elance are from areas of the world with a) excellent technical education and b) very low living costs (compared to e.g. North America, western Europe and Australia), I don't think it's proabably good to use Elance as a guide except maybe as a guide to how cheap development clients can be ;-)
(Unless you are in India, Pakistan or maybe eastern Europe, in which case Elance may be quite a good option...)
-B
The problem with printed material is that much of it is way out of date.
As costs and therefore prices vary not only from country to country but region to region it is impossible to tell you a particular amount. You must work it out from the bottom up - from costs up.
Do a search for web design price guideline or something similar and read what all the competition is posting as pricing. Add your city/region to get a look at your direct competition.
[edited by: stuntdubl at 12:08 am (utc) on July 26, 2004]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
First you have to figure out the expenses of doing business, which you don't have working for a company. That includes overhead and supplies like cost of equipment and tools - computers, scanner, printer, fax machine, voicemail or answering machine, all supplies like paper and cartridges, software - which is costly, etc.
Then there are all the things provided for you when working for a company - they pay part of taxes (like social security), independently you pay all. There's life, health, dental and vision insurance, unemployment and disability benefits (which are insurance), sometimes retirement, profit sharing and stock options in the case of big companies. Figure the minimum you'll have to take out of pocket and pay for whatever insurance you'll need to have to protect yourself.
Add on the cost of advertising, memberships, yellow pages advertising, business cards and printing if you do brochures, additional auto insurance premium if you use the car for business, and add all of that together - all the costs you will have. You can figure that all out to an annual basis, then break down into monthly and weekly by dividing. It'll vary - some spend a lot, some spend little.
That's your cost of doing business.
Time-wise, there's whatever time will be put into marketing - which includes all the communications, phone calls, possibly in-office visits, time spent doing proposals and negotiating, add that all up. Plus whatever time is spent attending trade meetings, going to Office Depot for supplies, maintaining your equipment, installing software... on and on. Then there's time spent communicating with clients, providing and trying to get information from them, having discussions related to building the site. And time spent on learning new software and keeping up with techniques.
All that is time spent on business that doesn't come under the classification of billable hours.
Figure out what you'd earn working for a company and subtract the dollar value of all the above costs of doing business from that figure. Then figure out the non-billable time and subtract that from normal work week and you'll get the number of billable hours you'll have to figure your hourly on.
Figure what would be earned on a job (plus the benefits added on, which my accounting teacher used to call psychic benefits), and subtract the above costs from that for an adjusted figure - considerably less than being employed. Those two figures, taking into consideration the number of billable hours you'll have available each week, should give a minimum hourly that would have to be charged to roughly equal working for a company. That's "earnings" -it's also considered that anyone running a business, including a web designer, should make a profit on their business - tack a percentage on for profit, and that should come up with at least a bare minimum break-even point.
That said, people will only pay what they're willing and able to pay and how much they think the "product" or service will be worth to them.
Marcia, as always, I enjoyed your post. But, the above was the "killer" true statement.
We may all assume that those that combine SEO and web development will be worth more? This is often true, but some may forget an ingredient if you skip over this too fast.
Prediction: In the next five years the most valuable resource will be the person that understands how to convert a visitor into a sale, much more valuable than the person that knows how to get the visitor to the site (i.e. the SEO).
I know the old bald headed Google Director buddy of us all has been slamming this philosophy for years, and let's be honest, we haven't been listening!
In the next five years Jacob will be proven right more than most will believe or want to accept!
Embrace the concept of working primarily on conversation rates now and you will be sitting pretty in the future :)
