# Web Page Deisgn



## Ping898 (Apr 30, 2004)

Looking for some ideas here,

I told my school I would design a web page for them, no biggie for me, but I haven't a clue what to charge them.  I need to charge them something, just so that this a true employer/employee thing and to just keep a line draw between me the student and me the programmer, plus they want me to come up with a fee.  I can't do a trade for lessons (they've had bad experiences with that in the past) so I am wondering if anyone out there has done something like this for their own school, or has a school and knows how much they would be willing to pay.  I realize rates vary based upon location (I am in New Mexico), but I really want to avoid quoting too much, and don't want to just say like $50, because I have more talent than that, and I know they are looking for a legit fee.  Any ideas or past experiences would be helpful.  Thanks


Peace.


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## michaeledward (Apr 30, 2004)

Charge them by the hour. Pick a number... Say $70.00 per hour. Assemble something in a couple of hours, and then see if they want you to modify it.

If they start getting some traffic from the web site, they may come back to you for more work, and it will be a good precident to have had set. Else, you may be making modifications for free, for a long time to come.

Alternatively, you could propose a flat fee for the initial output, and then tell them an hourly rate for modifications.

Mike


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## Ping898 (Apr 30, 2004)

You are right,  I was thinking just like a flat fee (I am lousy at keeping track of hours) for like the intial design and say 6 mon worths of updates and showing them how to change stuff like pictures and such, but how to you determine what that flat fee should be is what I am wondering.  I've always just done this stuff to help friends out and never charged before, so I don't have a good point of reference and I don't just want to pick a figure out of the air for the sake of having one, if that makes sense.


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## michaeledward (Apr 30, 2004)

How do you pick a fee?

Well ... every hour you spend building a web page for someone else, is an hour that you are not doing something else.

If you make, let's say, $30,000.00 per year ... that's about $14.40 per hour. But, your employer pays for benefits, which probably adds another 2 bucks per hour. (Self employed people are required to pay for these benefits).

So, for $16.50 an hour, you would be matching income for a 30k a year job.

Of course, you are not going to be able to spend 40 hours a week doing this work with no overhead. One factory I worked at multiplied the 'direct labor' costs by 350% to find the overhead (Building, Bills, Administrative Staff, Computers, etc) 

$16.50 * 350% = $74.25

Yes, that means for every dollar we spent having a worker build a widget, we spent three and a half bucks to allow them to do so. I do not think this figure is that far out of line.

Of course, you might just look in the paper and see how much people are charging. Then figure out how much your time and knowledge is worth.

I think 70 bucks is on the low side of what a good technician should charge ... but I also think the market won't allow you to charge quite that much. There are too many mediocre people with FrontPage out there building sites for a flat 100 bucks (I think).

Good luck.


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