joetheblow

Join Date 12/2001

Website design

I was wondering with all you designer/programmers/gui guys out there, how much do you charge a small upstart company to design a web site?

10 pages, database intense (like udate.com or matchmaker.com) and you would have to maintain the site for about 6 months.

Thanks, I appriatiate the helpful answers.

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One rate I recently saw was $40-$150/hr in the creation phase and $15-$30/hr for regular maintainance.

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I know that may seem a lot to you, but most web designers only get contracts every month or two and they have to jack the price up to feed themselves.

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I usually charge a flat rate of $40/page and a set of smaller fee options for maintaince, but so far I've just been doing regular html pages for small local businesses.

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Which job are you doing? Code, UI? UI is something you can walk in and walk back out. If you are developing the site itself, that would take some sober thought. A site like matchmaker.com gets tons of traffic. Make sure they know what kind of traffic they are gonna have, and are prepared for a lot more.

If you are starting from scratch on something like that, I would assume the development phase would last long into the maintenence phase, lol. I can't remember a large DB site that was ever actually finished, honestly.

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I build webpages, but they are never made into real sites. I just mess around in Photoshop, tinker with FrontPage, and pop in some scripts from dynamicdrive.com. I just build them for fun, to see what I can do. I have had many offers to build websites, but I have not actualy made one for someone. I've been working with html for 3years, and Photoshop only about 2 months, but I can make some really great stuff, but I'm not going into skinning, thake too much time.

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A useful links for web designers.
http://validator.w3.org/

I found that Frontpage isn't very friendly to Online visitors.
Dreamweaver is the way to go if a program is used.

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Thanks guys. I was designing a web site for a company. for the most part it would have been the user interface and some of the maintainance and design of the database. The guy did not want to pay me any up front costs and would only give 5% of the profits of which, of course, depends on if the business is sucessful.

Whats more is that he said he has costumers waiting and is in a rush to start. But check this up: The team needed to use his computer to show him what was designed so far and his computer broke down. For 5 days he would not want to fix his computer until he could "find" someone who would do it for free or 50 dollars. As oppossed to just taking it to a store and geting it fixed now so we could continue.

He seems very cheap even though he says he has many customers waiting and the payment from these customers is pretty high let allone the amount of people who would have came to the site and jioned the program

I am new at this but not that new. I guess he was just a scam artist looking for quick cash and then bounce out of the game never to be seen again. Leaving us with the bag. What a rip.

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Oh and it would be much like macthmaker.com or kiss.com with a little lavalife.com to liven things up.

But it also had some very key features. Oh well. Maybe next time. I am still mad about this. I could have used the income but with me fooling aound with him I lost out on other jobs I could have been doing. Now I have nothing. Boy did I learn my lesson

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whoops I forgot, I meant devoloping not designing the site.

I guess there is a big difference

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joetheblow, I've had clients like that, dump him like a hotcake. If you do end up doing the site for him, you'll have to watch him very very carefully and put every thing into writing. Also, you'll need to be willing to contact a lawyer at a drop of a hat. I guarentee he will use every trick in the book to try and screw you, and miss many payments to boot.

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another good site for beginers is www.elated.com, templates and wonderful forum.

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Just a thought, be very careful when you deal with start-up or companies that want to pay you on the backside of their business. 99% of the time you will not see anything down the road. If you look at the job as a starting point or way to put together a show peice, your design with their content then it is worth it. But from the little you said it sounds a little off. As for doing a database site, definetly lok at charging customers for it, the last time I looked the going rate for a full blown DB site was $125/hr for your time and skill, getting started you can drop that down a lot, but do not cut yourself short. Good luck and hope it works out.

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anyone else want to share web design rates?

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paxx

Join Date 03/2001

I charge about $50 Canadian/hour nowadays (that's about $30 US). Just two years ago, I could charge easy $80 to $120/hour. Over those days. Back to real life.

But anyway, I do this on the side for now, I don't really need the money, and little bit extra is just nice.

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paxx

Join Date 03/2001

BTW, when I say I do this on the side. I mean I do this for myself on the side. My day job is the same, except it's for a my employer.

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