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What would you say is the average cost to webmaster a magazine website?
How should I let her know that I'm not getting paid enough to be graphic designer and webmaster, without sounding ungrateful?
What would you say is the average cost to webmaster a magazine website?
I'm afraid that's a 'how long is a piece of string' question - depends on what the work will actually be.
How should I let her know that I'm not getting paid enough to be graphic designer and webmaster, without sounding ungrateful?
Just be very factual and polite. Remember that you have a business relationship here - it's not that she's doing you a favour paying you, it's that she's getting the work she needs done, and in return she (should be) paying you a fair rate.
One possible route you could take:
- explain to her that if you do take on the website, you'll need to work out how many hours work it will be so that you can provide her with a quote for the work.
- then discuss with her what she wants the website to actually be/do. Get a written spec and agree it with her. Work out how long it'll take you to do, and give a price on that basis.
You'll want to think about how the website will actually add value to the business. Will it be:
- advertising?
- getting people to buy the paper version?
- building a community to increase reader loyalty?
- or something else?
If all that she really needs if for the PDFs to be converted to HTML and placed online, then she may get better value for money having that kind of work done offshore, and you could take on some other project where your skills add more value.
hth, a.
PS Also worth thinking about: if the mag is available completely free online, will this stop people buying the print copy?
I'm pretty sure it would entail updating the website with the new articles and photos from the current issue
It could provide better value for her if you were to set her up with a content management system to allow the journos to enter the articles themselves.
Setting up print content for the web is really a sub-editing task these days, there's no need to have a graphic designer involved at all, as long as all the articles can have a consistent layout.
I've used this kind of workflow before - i.e. web folks setting up the CMS and then journos entering the actual articles - and it's worked fine. The problems that do occur tend to be around images rather than text, print journalists aren't used to working with images and simple things like 'file size' and 'image dimensions' can be a problem for them (e.g. they think all their images are the same size because they're viewing them in IE and it's resizing them automatically to the window size).
hth, a.
