Web Design Pricing Opinions

Hi Everyone - rather important question for you...

My business is roughly 50% SEO and 50% web design. The SEO I handle all myself. The web design I generally work with someone else on, as he is a very good designer and programmer. He produces "higher quality" sites than I myself can produce, and thus enables me to appeal to larger clients. I, in turn, have proven to be a pretty good salesperson. Thus, with regard to web design projects I act as the salesperson / project manager, and he does most of the actual design and development of the sites.

Up until now we'll basically bid a price and then if/when we get the project we'll try and figure out how to split things up between ourselves. For a while we were doing it 50/50, but there are some projects, particularly larger ones in which I felt as though it should be more 40/60 as I thought he would require a good bit of time in development, perhaps more proportionally than a 50/50 split.

Anyhow, we've got a few projects now we're about to start on that range between $4,000 and $8,000 in total charges, and we're not quite sure how to split up the pie. On his end, its fairly easy for him to figure out how many hours it will take to do each part of the project and thus how much he would want to charge (hours x hourly rate). For the sales part, and hourly rate isn't so practical, since I'll spend alot of time working on projects that we dont ever actually land, whereas he spends all his time on actual projects we have landed.

What do you think is a fair percentage price for finding the lead, making the sale and interfacing with the client (i.e. everything BUT actual design/development)??? 20%? 35%? 50%? 75%? Just want your thoughts...