I have been asked a number of times if I would build websites for people BUT what and how much should I charge
I work on my companies website and our church website and have a few of my own. I have been asked many times if I would build sites for others in our town. I could really use the extra money and have been doing a little research. Should I have the client pay me up front for one a year of hosting and domain and set the account up myself? Or should I have them do that? What should I charge to do this service? Should I charge a set fee to build the site and then so much an hour to maintain it? Any help on this or any ideas would be greatly apprecitated. Thanks in advanced.
Tagged with: church website • extra money
Filed under: Building Websites
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You have to put a price on your time and charge an hourly rate.
But when you do… they will want results.
It is better to practice first and estimate how long it would take you to build a new website from scratch.
How long it will take you depends very much of what they want. And how big the website will be.
The biggest job is to design the homepage and a template for all the other pages. Unless you are really good at it… those two will require almost 2 days work before you are satisfy with them. It of course includes the job of building the menus.
Setting up the domain and hosting them is a separate job… which is no big deal to you… but might be a big deal for them.
By law… they should purchase the domain under their own name. But you can setup the DNS for them.
For the hosting… you can host them on your own hosting account if you have one. Otherwise… choose an hosting service for them… and ask them to sign up with it.
If you don’t trust them to pay you for your work… I would most definitely ask them some money up front before starting.
And I would not do anything before they purchased the domain and the hosting service. Once they did that… at least you know they mean business.
It depends on the size of the website. You can either do one from scratch, which should be a small site…perhaps with 4-6 pages, or one thats gonna have 20 pages, which you should use a CMS software to create. I am curently working with a group of people whose starting a new company running 2 websites and they purchased everything for me: the domains, server, and purchased PHPcow to create the pages (see phpcow.com). These are the sites:
http://myrgvsports.com
http://myuniversalministry.com
Lots of sections therefore phpcow is used to save time. 100.00 to download plus domain and server purchased seperately.
Therefore it depends on your client. I would charge to work on it and then so much an hr to maintain. Thats my plan cuz I want to do the same thing for others as well. Just take into consideration the materials you need for it to work. Make sure you have a contract just in case. Its a lot of work so just charging 200 is low. Depending on the size I’d go with at least 600 or more.
hope I explained well. heres my personal site, its small and I did it from scratch.
http://mmendoonline.com
If you have the skills to build and maintain websites (which it sounds like you do) you can definitely make some money doing that. Personally I like to handle the hosting and domain myself, it leads to less issues with a client not renewing services, forgetting account info etc. I would bill about 6 weeks before the renewal is due to make sure your covered. I would also recommend billing hourly so you don’t get caught in a bad fixed bid situation. As far as what to charge can really depend on your location and what exactly your doing (static HTML pages, design, Database/SQL, programming etc.) $25-$75 from simplest to hardest.
I would charge a certain fee per year for hosting, I would look at the cost involved of hosting someones website, then add a little markup so that you can make a profit. I would ask for this fee before the year that you will be hosting. I would setup the hosting and domain for them, this way you know how it is done etc. I would charge a flat setup fee then a hosting fee. The setup fee would be a charge for you time + any expenses. so adjust your price accordingly.
When building/maintaining a site for someone the price will depend how good you are, and how much your time is worth. If you can provide high end sites you can of course charge more for those than what you would for a simple site.
I would charge a certain amount for the building of the site, then so much a month for maintanince. Depending on the site. If you realize that the site would need daily maintanince you could increase your price.
For a staring point most web programmers can make anywhere between $50,000 to over a $100,000 a year depending on their experience, abilities etc.
So the low end per hour would (assuming 50,000/year) be around $26.00/hr.
high end: $52.00/hr.
One option is:
Get paid monthly for hosting if you offer it
Get paid for registering a domain just only when you do it
Get paid once for the website designing and programming
Get paid monthly if your client needs to change frequently the info on the website