Small Town Web Design Work: What to Charge?

[GarlicScented]

Currently I live in a small beach community in the PacNW, and have picked up some web design work on the side. In the past when I have done web work it has usually been on a barter basis, but this job is going to be primarily a cash one.

It's not going to be a ground-up build as the owner is plenty happy with the general design of what he has. It's going to be along the lines of adding some beveled photos, rearranging a photo gallery by subject, some logo work, and probably the creation of a few pages based on the existing design. Really nothing too overly technical, but technical enough that he needs me to do it.

I've did some Googling and can't seem to find anything that gives a good answer, so I figured that I'd pose my question to the technical community of the Anandtech forums. I'm assuming that the best way to charge would be by the hour, but I'm at a loss as to how much. I want to be fair to both parties (not overcharge, not give it away). The number I'm coming up with is $25/hr. Is that an accurate ballpark figure? More? Less?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and throwing out your opinion.

 

[archiloco]

sounds fair. I think it varies in exactly what you do. so you said some editing and 25 sounds good, but for actual design it should be more around the 35-40.

 

[mugs]

I'm sure people will say you shouldn't work for less than $75 an hour, but you know your area better than we do, and you know what your customer(s) can afford better than we do. $25/hour seems reasonable, maybe $30 if you think your customer would pay it.

BUt umm.... beveled photos? What is this, 1996?

 

[GarlicScented]

He's got beveled photos all over the site, and likes them. I wouldn't mind steering him away from them, but at the same time if he's happy with it...

 

[purbeast0]

I would say $250 flat out.

I've been working on a side site as well for someone and it was so simple to do. Basically I just retook their old design and touched it up and added a buncha pictures they took from in store that they wanted on the site. However, many of the tables on different pages were all screwed up and the format just didn't look that clean on some pages.

They got a quote from some other professional company charging them $5K to basically just put pictures from their digital camera onto the website ... $5K!!! of course he said screw it and didnt do it, but I am now doing it for them. I told them $500 and they said no problem.

Even though it's pretty damn simple work for me (I also had to write a little php script so they could upload the new ad every week and it would place it in the "weekly ad section") it was 10x less than what these other guys quoted them.

So I would say atleast $250. As you said, he doesn't know jack about this stuff, and if he quoted a professional I'm sure it would be a lot more than that.

 

[GarlicScented]

I'd quote a flat dollar amount, but this is going to be an ongoing thing I'm thinking. Regular updates with things going on at the business, updates to photos, a calendar of events, the whole enchilada.

 

[ThePresence]

Originally posted by: GarlicScented
He's got beveled photos all over the site, and likes them. I wouldn't mind steering him away from them, but at the same time if he's happy with it...

Heh. Welcome to the world of design. The customer always knows what looks better, and 99.9% of the time he's wrong. But he's paying for it to look the way he wants, not for it to just look nice. I have this problem daily.

 

[GarlicScented]

I guess that I can be thankful that he doesn't have a purple paisley-tiled background with yellow Comic Sans.

 

[purbeast0]

Originally posted by: GarlicScented
I'd quote a flat dollar amount, but this is going to be an ongoing thing I'm thinking. Regular updates with things going on at the business, updates to photos, a calendar of events, the whole enchilada.

give them a flat fee then an hourly fee for the updates that they want as they come, like $25/hour or whatever you think is good for that.

 

[rh71]

http://www.getafreelancer.com/

gives you an idea of what people are charging and for what. Of course the difference is there's a ton of competition there while you may have little/none.