I am in Costa Rica for the winter in a fairly rural area on the west coast but the local industry is a lot of hostels and restaurants or surf shops, many either dont have a website or have a terrible one. I have some experience creating HTML& CSS sites and more recently done wordpress sites for myself or my old employer. I know about enough php to make minor adjustments to wordpress themes. (my goal is to learn enough to create my own theme) I created a relatively basic site for a hostel with a reservation form, info, gallery with a wordpress theme. I want to go around and offer it as a sample for hostels who might be in need of one. A local hostel manager told me they were currently paying 3,000$ for a new website and that people around here normally charge 1-2,000$ minimum. This is far higher than i expected to charge (especially since i dont have much for portfolio or experience, i was thinking more 200-300 maybe.) But does anyone have any advice as to what i should reasonably ask for in creating a wordpress site for a local business? or how i should approach people, i dont have any way of making business cards but I think there is a good chance at least someone might interested. Thanks!
Do you have access to a printer? Just print up some cards giving your contact information. It is essential that the client be able to contact you in some way to buy. Selling is selling. If you already have a site that you can demo, that is a big plus. Approach the clients, show them what you have made already, promote the fact that they can get more business, show them what their customers will experience when accessing the webpage, and show them some ways that their customers can find them Figure out what you need to survive. If you need $100 a week to survive, and can do two websites a week, then you need to charge at least $50 each. Then if the customer wants more work, it would be at least $2 per hour (50 hours a week x $2 = $100). This gives you 50 hours a week to design, and the other 30 to go out and sell. When you get more work than you can handle, then start raising your prices and you can move away from survival mode. Another idea, get together a group of smaller hostels and create one web site for the lot. The customer can choose dates and hostels, and when one is full the customers can choose another from the same group. Everybody chips in $50 a month each for the site, hosting and maintenance.
1) You charge what you think your time is worth. If you think the site you did is worth $200-$300, that's what you charge. 2) Make sure you put something like "Design by jbourne84" (or whatever name you use) down in the footer in a small font and make it a link to your site, so people who see the site can contact you. Bring a smartphone, tablet or laptop with you when you call on people, and use the site you designed as your "card". (As wizardofx said, if there's a Staples (or equivalent) where you are, buy a small box of business card forms, design a card and print some up. In the US you can get a box of 250 (on 8-1/2X11 sheets) for about $15.)
First, never tell a lie about your skills. Don't say you know something if you don't really just for the sake of getting a project. If you're working as a freelance, you can go to Odesk to look for projects. You can also have an idea about the prevailing market rates today there.
Or you can work at McDonalds, not have to learn anything, no going out to sell, and earn 4 times as much. Web development is worth AT LEAST $15/hour, and that's for someone who can barely get the site working. A professional wouldn't even laugh at that rate. So if he needed $100/week to survive, he'd have to work for almost 7 hours a week. (If you're doing web development for $2/hour, and you're any good, I'll hire you to work for me for as many hours a week as you like. I'd even pay you $3/hour.)
LOL, I didn't say he needed $100 a week to survive, I was using that as an example. I have started 5 businesses, real brick-and-mortar businesses, so I have a little insight. The "capital" in "capitalism" means "money." Getting to break-even in any business before you run out of money is fundamental. You rarely know how much time and money it will take, so a very good strategy is to set your expectations low and realistic and keep your overhead as low as humanly possible. I am trying to explain what it might take to get started in rural Costa Rica. Going into hostels looking for a $3000 design contract might be a good recipe for starving to death. But matching your needs with theirs can get you a stable income that can then be built on. I have seen a lot of businesses, free lance and others, fail because of unrealistic expectations. After all, the best way to set pricing is to know what it is worth to the customer. If your customer has a billion dollars in sales looking for two, web development might be worth more than a customer that has ten rooms renting out at 8 dollars a day with 50% occupancy rate. wiz
If they're currently paying $1,000-$2,000 for a site, he knows what the current market is, so an example using those numbers would have been more realistic, and less misleading to others who read your post. As far as experience, you should know that selling a widget for 1/4 the price that everyone else is selling the same widget for doesn't usually get you much business - people are leery of really deep "bargains". If he charges $500-$1,000 he's undercutting the competition, but by a reasonable amount. Then his earnings depend on how fast he can produce good results. As he gets better, his price can stay the same but his earnings go up because it takes him less time to do the work.
i did a walk around offering sites anywhere between 100-300 depending on what their situation seemed to be, got a lot of interest, especially for the price. People who said they were all set at first had a lot more questions when i said the price. (for whatever acting interested while face to face is worth). I think my biggest drawback was having to write out my contact info, although everyone was happy to have me write it down, i made a business card template in word so im going to go try and find a printer today so i dont have to worry about my hand writing legibility or misspellings. Another question - I currently host my site with justhost.com and I believe i have a single domain plan, I think it was one price to host one domain and another price to host multiple. Im sure i can upgrade easy enough if i need to but is the hosting something you would normally charge, plus the yearly domain name fees if they dont already have one? Thanks all, this has been very helpful for me
The most I ever do is suggest which hosts have worked for me, but I don't even suggest which one they should use, let alone getting hosting for them. That would be like your car dealer telling you which gas station to use. You'll find, when you get some experience, that some clients think that by hiring you to set up a site for them, they've bought your services for life. I want to do the site, have them approve it (I'll work on any little details they're not happy with) and get out. If they want more work or have a problem with their host, that's something we can negotiate, but it's not an ongoing relationship. (Letting them think it is will give you 80 hours every week of unpaid work.) It's this is what you get for this much money - any later changes or additional work will be at an additional fee to be negotiated at that time. Look around the web for samples of web development contracts.