How much to charge for a Website?

Well. I am not sure whether this is the right thread for this post but I found this the most suitable one. I designed a website for a client quoting a fix price for 25 pages maximum.

However, 6 of the pages has too much content which was placed in separate div's and called using jquery. In short content equivalent to 10 pages was fit into 1 page and the site has 6 such pages apart from several other regular pages. Even though I have completed the website (just homepage pending) , still I wish to know how much you would have charged for a similar website and what would be the appropriate cost in India.

The website is temporarily uploaded at abhilashpillai.com / bizmind (remove spaces)

Abhilash.

 

Charge your clients what you think you're worth. Not less and not more.

 

Charging on a per page basis is a pretty dated business model, unless you are the one writing all of the content. Fixed fee's are how I have always operated, but that differ's with each client.

 

Like dlb said, the per page model is extremely dated. The most popular way now is a package price or hourly price. The package prices are based on an estimate of the hours it takes to do it.

Personally I hate the hourly model too, when I am subcontracting out I don't really want to know how much an hour as much as I want to know total hours. If you are charging $40 an hour great, how many hours does it take YOU to do a ten page website, or install a coy of Wordpress through cPanel and install plugins and a theme? That varies from person to person.

I would much rather be in more control, estimate the time it should take the average person and pay a price according to that project. Much like when you take your vehicle in to be repaired. The dealership mechanic looks the job up in a book, the book tells him how long the job should take on average and how many hours to bill for. It may only take him/her 15 minutes it may take twice as long, the price is still based on that suggested time.

Website development should be the same way, how long would it take someone that does web development on a regular basis to create a site? Take that time multiply it by the hourly rate you want to charge be it $20 an hour or $125 an hour and create your package price.

Keep in mind when quoting that there are different prices for different skill levels, writing CSS and HTML is one price...it tends to average between $40 to $85 an hour. Programming Javascript and PHP is a completely different rate and usually averages between $65 and $125. Working in different script environments also varies such as the difference between working in a Wordpress environment is usually cheaper that working in a Drupal environment.

My suggestion would be do a search for pricing for what you are doing, go on to some of the sites like freelancer and the like and see what the average charges are going for. Take the average and come up with your pricing structure...also as to the per page pricing....a lot of people today are smart or savvy enough to realize that except for the areas that are completely different or have additions that once the general layout is created it is more of a copy and paste or data input job and that the programming/creation part stands for almost all of the separate pages....you don't have to use wordpress or another script to be able to create a header, footer type of them set up, it can be done using php and include extremely easily...

 

Average Costs:

Small website - $300 - 1,500
Medium website - $1,500 - 3,500
Large website - $5,000 - 10,000
Ecommerce website - $1,500

Even a simple Blog will require:

• Graphical comps produced in Photoshop or similar Graphics editing software
• Graphical splicing for optimal CSS/XHTML structure
• CSS/XHTML production in standards-compliant fashion
• Unique CSS/XHTML adaptation to CMS platform of choice (wordpress, drupal, etc.)
• Bell-and-whistle functionality to meet client requirements