Be Excellent To Each Other

Roughly how much would it cost me to hire one or more of you fine people, or friends of you people, to rapidly put together a website for someone I know?

It's a business website that'll be little more than an online catalogue with lots of categories, including a regular stock of items and loads of one-off 'first come first served'-type things. I ask this largely out of curiosity as I've seen what some people will pay for work that ah... well, that frankly is a load of hideous, broken shit that I could improve on using basic html in less time than it would take to un-screw their mess.

It's a bit 'how long is a piece of string' as a question, frankly. Do they want something they can manage themselves, or do they want the designer to maintain it. How are they intending to receive payment?

Since nobody has replied yet I will.

Edit: Beaten by Craig, doh.

Is this an online shopping portal, or just a *list* of stuff people buy through some other mechanism? If the latter then it'd be a heck of a lot cheaper as generally the fag of these things is integrating the payment part and making it callback order details, etc. etc.

At a vague stab I'd say something like £500-800 for a basic catalogue 'look at the stuff I've got' type site, and something like twice as much for a fairly reasonable bells/whistles online ordering thing with user accounts, order history, invoice generation blahblah etc.

For £50 an hour, you get us

For £50 an hour, I can get three polish hookers at the same time.

Yeah, but I bet they're shit at jQuery.

Apparently, I need to put up my hourly rate.

Web design is such a massively over inflated market! Any monkey can do it as well

Yes, you and me both. Although I guess the £50 an hour is an "agency cost" rather than an "individual".

I've PMed you with some information anyway, Mr. Sinister.

Any monkey can do it, but only a few special monkeys can do it well.

Have you asked Mimi then?

I'm willing to work as a consultant on this project for £10,000 plus expenses. And that's mates rates.

I do this sort of thing for a decent professional rate.

I'm booked up at the moment, but happy to talk about it.

How much do you charge just to talk about it, though?

Even the polish hookers charge to talk about it.

This.

(Booked up at the moment. Tcha.)

I like your face. 20p a word.

6p a day.

Bloody hell. That's the cheap rate, too

My company does high level, full scale web retail sites. Credit Card payment, warehouse integration, fancy shenannigans, the lot. Fully managed enterprise solutions. Yours for the low, low cost of about 50k a year!

And I'm a published author on this stuff, too. Clearly, I should be charging a bajillion pounds per hour*, rather than the [less than £50—Ed.] that I currently do. Mind you, you should hear potential clients scurry for the hills when I quote similar rates for copywriting.

* Or just give up this carefree freelance life and work for Grim..., obv., and take about six months of the year off on my new yacht that I'd be able to afford.

A yacht big enough to drive around in a 4x4, don't forget!

Craig, slacking on his yacht. Yesterday.

Tomorrow, man. I don't have one yet, and won't until Grim... employs me and gives me a level of pay so high it'd make my head swim and eyes water.

Still, it'd be interesting to know Grim...'s top rate. When I first worked in the industry, in the late 1990s, I was pimped out at nearly a grand per day, despite not entirely knowing what I was doing. Now, I work for a fraction of that, and write books about web design. Clearly, something's very wrong with the world, unless you have a Grim... level of cunning, obv.

This certainly seems to be the case.

I have a client who has paid someone to do a website for them. They wanted a catalogue people could order from (credit cards) that they could manage themselves. The someone has taken a third of the money and subcontracted to someone else (a Czech company, judging by some of the filler text), and come back with a site that looks like a domain squatter, except uglier, and a bit broken.

I wouldn't pay what they did for it, but I am a notorious cheapskate. It seems like my insticts were right though, as they paid more for what they got than any of you would charge (well, they didn't pay £50 an hour, but then I think your lot would have finished it in a weekend and not four months. And I kind of doubt you'd take three weeks to answer your phone, too). Plus

What makes this worse than a simple con in my view is that the person responsible is supposedly a friend of the client. So right now I'm very tempted to storm his office and tell him to do it properly or I'll set fire to his house.

Cheers everyone.

I do agree, web design is an enormously inflated business. It can sometimes make me look like a bit of a hero when I come in and undercut the £5000 quotes by £4500. I cry for the ignorance of people who don't appreciate what is sometimes really not that much work but get completely taken in by someone spouting all kinds of tosh.

Despite my desperate desire to earn cash, I find I just can't charge a silly amount for something that might only take me a couple of hours but could be fobbed off as weeks worth of work. I feel bad. Sometimes I've even gone the other way and charged far too little just because I was worried the client might think I was ripping them off.

The trouble is, it's a completely unregulated business. You could never regulate it. Any muppet with a cracked copy of Dreamweaver and a bit of design skill can get something static and functional working in hours. People with truly rare skill (of which I am not) are few and far between, and look an awful lot like the shiesters that battle to squeeze as much out of you for very little in return.

I do try not to say I 'own a web design firm', because I know it sounds almost fake. Perhaps I should chop wood for a living instead, you can't argue with that.

I get what you mean. I actually threw together a rough html template for their site months back (in the absence of any progress from thse other bloke) just to get an idea of what they were doing with it so I'd know what to expect (they're very techy-inept and weren't clear about what their plans for internet expansion were). Judging by their reaction, I could have got away with charging them through the nose for just doing an ancient html site and tacking on a third-party e-commerce system, but I wouldn't be able to sleep if I did that. I kind of wish I had now though, as it would have actually saved them a lot of money because frankly they'd be better off with the creaking one I threw together.

I've seen some other sites that people have paid loads for that I could have done in a weekend for half the price, and I'm not exactly cutting edge. It'd be nice to work with someone with your working attitude for a change, and not the lazy scammers I've seen about.

I think the most I've charged for a single site was £1250 which was for a golf society. It included all graphical production, an online event entry system, a backend database to manage member details, exporting said details for mail merge, a nifty event score import system that sorted it all into a nice league table, and all the copy for the site which included research and sourcing details for each club played at. Didn't take weeks and weeks, but I certainly felt like I earned it. That was during uni too, and that amount of money made me feel truly rich

I've been shooting myself in the arse lately by making a couple of free charity websites, mostly for people who couldn't afford the absurd bastard quotes they got when they approached other 'firms'. I usually offer to do the site and maintenance for free if they can cough up for the yearly hosting fee of £60. I'm a sucker for a good cause.

I charge what might seem large rates, not at Grim... level mind, but not "mates rates" either.

It is my living. What I do get pissed off with is people doing it for money that is well below what it is costing them in time, simply to earn 100 quid. Screws the market for the rest of us.

I can understand that, but consider this:

£1,500 for a five-page website in html with no e-commerce or member gubbins - just text and pictures.

In comic sans.

Yes, people like that need to be stabbed in the face.

Then that is totally cunty. But idiotic on the part of the customer.

It is an odd market to pitch into, to be honest. On the one hand, you've got people knocking out five pages for a 100 quid and doing the work while getting paid at another job. That is an advantage I simply don't have.

On the other, you've got the thickie customers, who get taken for a ride. How come I never find them? Not because I want to rip them off, but they've obviously got more money than sense, so I can get paid a decent rate for a decent job.

As it is, I seem to find people who have been horribly screwed over ("That domain name we said we had bought for you? Well, we didn't. Now pay us £££ or we switch off everything and sell it to Russian spammers") and spend time rebuilding their sites and their confidence.

I don't think I could do web design for a living. I look after the company website and some of the input you get you know is a load of rubbish but as it's come from someone higher up, you have to do it anyway, knowing it's doing the site no favours. Ho hum. Still, I've been dabbling more with php and creating functional websites is far more interesting.

I gave advice to another charity recently that had paid £5000 to a company who basically just implemented an existing CMS and reskinned it. Without content.

After I informed them of this, they were naturally very unhappy, but resigned as the money had already been spent. What pisses me off more than anything is that £5000 to that particular charity was an enormous amount of money, but the cuntface arseholes of the company in question clearly didn't care one bit.

Some people seem to have balls of steel when it comes to selling this stuff. I recently finished a web-based thing that'll be useful for quite a few companies and this morning the pricing was discussed. I envisaged an initial set-up fee plus a small cost to cover hosting. The CEO's first idea was as well as the other fees to charge per page of output generated. Great way to encourage take-up of the system there.

I came up with a nice phrase that describes what I feel about companies like that - "professionally offended". I take pride in my work and make damned sure that the final product is what the customer wants - partly because it is my living and partly because I am one of those lucky bastards who can do his hobby for good money, and I know that I'm lucky. That sort of thing just fucks me off, totally.

Dunno if it endemic in the industry, though. I work a contract at a College at the moment and because I was busy building a clustered Sharepoint site, I simply didn't have the time to do the public facing site - so they went to an outside company, who did a very good job and I worked with them on the design, and wrote the hooks into the back end database for courses and such.

I got very angry when they came back six months later saying "did you know it doesn't meet X standard and you really need functionality Y" and were basically trying to screw more money out, doing me out of a job at the same time.

Admittedly, I think they were a little pissed off when I asked them to send all the artwork over in AI/PSD format. Artwork the College had designed in the first place - that is another bugbear of mine, sell the first set of icons for a fiver, another one after the fact? 200 quid...

In December I did nineteen hours of work and invoiced for six grand, and I had my full-time job on top of that - it was a good Christmas

Normally, however, it's £75 an hour for complicated stuff, and £50 an hour for easy stuff.
There are three of us, though.

[edit]This was in reply to CraigGrannell from the bottom of the last page.

I remember what I meant to ask you - how did writing that book come about? Did someone ask you to do it, or did you offer?

Hello Grim...

Would you mind holding this orb for a moment?

Grim... Your words would make me sad if I didn't think you were a genuinely top bloke.

Are you thinking of a 'My Grim... Book, by Grim...'

Come on now - it was somewhat complicated work. Ahem.

Due to recent charitable giving I can only condone Grim...'s rate of pay, regardless of how absurd it may seem to others

I couldn't do web design for a living. I send far to long move things up and down 2px on different browsers, and making sure it scales correctly, and that blind people can read it etc etc. I hate it. I don't know how you guys put up with such a ropey, flakey system of working. Is that why you charge ten bazillion dollars a second? If you ask me, people with simple text pages have the right idea, like the GNU site as an example off the top of my head -- peeeeeerfect.


Speaking of careers....someone give me a job?

Jesus, neither could I.

£1250 for a single site? Not a living? That's 15 sites a year to get the average uk salary. 15 sites in 365 days! Piss easy. Thought I imagnie finding gullable punters is the hard part, right?

I am very much in favour of keeping things as simple as is necessary, both technically and aesthetically. Particularly aesthetically - bold and clear designs and themes are right up my alley. I don't like all those fashionable mirrored effects and I fucking despise pastels.

derp

I think what he's getting at is that he does the coding, not the design.

I could be wrong, but that's what I've done on a few sites. Left the design to other people.

I'm pretty good at the desig side of things, as it happens. Being a bit of an artsy ponce helps. I mean to team up with a few technically-skilled but slightly artless people this year and see what happens, since it'll be faster than techying up myself, but it's on the back burner at the moment. Stupid universe, with its 'not bending to my will' policy.