Forum Moderators: mack
well, for one thing, it appears you're planning on charging "per page". That would be a "don't"... unless you plan on making a living designing little 4 page mom-and-pop business sites for $250. I'm not being sarcastic there... you really could go that route if you wanted.
Per page makes the most sense to small-time or start-up clients, but you have to smack them around and wake them up out of that thinking. Would you want to charge the same amount of money for these three pages:
1. "Email us!": A mailto link users click if they want to order the product.
2. "Order Form": complex Javascript and server-side form validation.
3. "Flash interactive shopping cart": Full-flash product catalog with drag-and-drop to shopping cart capability.
The two most popular ways to charge a serious client are a labor rate (per hour charge with a pre-estabished estimate of total hours for the project), or a lump sum, which usually warrants a detailed meeting with both parties, laying out the important details like whether or not they need Flash, how content will be updated, whether or not you are writing the copy for them, where the images are going to come from, etc.
Until you have the experience under your belt, where you can hear a client's idea and instantly visualize a price tag based on what they've said, it's best to go with the hourly rate. I've seen anywhere from $50 to $200/hr for small design firms and single designers... best that you start low if you ask me... get your feet wet without feeling the pressure of having to fulfill your large price tag.
Of course, like I mentioned, a lot of small-time clients will go running to the cheapest, most easy to understand pay plan... so if you think you'll have a lot of those clients, and you notice that some of them hear your hourly rate and then say "well my cousin Joey said he'll do my site for 20 bucks a page", then perhaps you do want to give the per page thing a try, at least for the little fish. But I promise you that at some point, you'll have a client that will take you to the cleaners by having you design a 4 page site that takes you 30 hours to complete. Everybody stops charging per page at some point in their career; most of the time, it's after the very first website.
The only other "do and don't" I'll give you, as this is getting lengthy, is to make sure both parties understand who is responsible for updating the site. Too many times with small clients, they call you up on a weekend and ask you to put up 40 photos for them, and you say they are supposed to do their own updates, and they say that's what they paid you for, and you say ok well then pay me and i'll do it, and they say they only needed to pay you once and now they own your soul forever... you get the idea.
