In my case this will be part of my qualification process over the phone. I’ve learned from my last experience that a lead who DOESN’T even want to talk about basic prices over the phone is probably a tire kicker… I ended up writing a 7 page proposal (Slickly designed I might add) for him. And a few days later I called him back and he told me he had to “discuss it with his partner”. Never got a call back, or even a “Hey sorry but we don’t have the funds currently for this.” So of course now laying down my prices and trying to see if they can afford it is part of my qualification process now.
So I’m just wondering in particular HOW you bring this up. I think people like to know in general what they’re paying for, however they also respect people who cut to the chase and tell them the price upfront. So how bout something along the lines of “You should treat websites as part of your marketing plan, and typically overall it’s best to put in between 5-7% of your total revenue towards your marketing. A basic website with 15-20 pages will cost “x”. 20 hours will be devoted to the photoshop design where you’ll be given a few templates to choose from, 10 hours goes into researching and writing the content, 30 hours into coding the CSS & XHTML into each page, and then 10 more hours systematically testing each page on all browsers operating systems.”
How does something like that sound? Is it bad to mention specific hours? How do you do it and why?
*As an aside, how do you deal with “partnerships?” where there is more than one decision maker? My target is restaurants and I’m thinking of maybe narrowing it down to family owned ones where one person owns the majority of the equity.
Determining the required hours is like determining the length of a piece of string that you haven’t seen yet. It depends on the requirements of the job, so be careful. I would rather say that you should meet with them and hash out the real needs and scope of the site in detail before getting anywhere near a quote.
And charge separately for the consultation, so that they pay for all that tire kicking.
20 hours will be devoted to the photoshop design where you’ll be given a few templates to choose from, 10 hours goes into researching and writing the content …
Watch out for designing for designing’s sake. Deal with the needs of the content first, as that will inform the layout and design, and you won’t have to come up with a bunch of random designs. Don’t force content into a design; work the other way around.
how do you deal with “partnerships?” where there is more than one decision maker?
Get them to make a decision about who’s the go-to person and make them stick to it.
I’m actually estimating based on some practice sites I made with a full menu and everything but point taken. I think I prefer charging based on the project in total rather than hourly or something like that. Though… technically the total project is based on an hourly projection ironically enough i.e. 50-100 hours x a base rate. So this is more of a qualification thing more than anything. Cause I don’t wanna go out set up a meeting with them only to find out that they have 1000$ budget.
Is it a good idea to mention the total price first? I also include custom photography in my price so I’m thinking of simply breaking down the total project into parts and putting a price tag at the end of each of them without mentioning total hours. So something like, template design and custom graphics would be x amount, custom photography x amount, then the css and html x amount etc. So then we could talk more about content and what not in detail to see what they need exactly (Though my target is restaurants without websites so they might not even know what they need).
^This. Always FULLY spec a job out before you price. Always say that a price is an estimate only, and always fully define a “scope” of the project (Scope creep is horrible for your morale).
Don’t ever be afraid to bring money up - as someone once said to me “always work for what you think you’re worth - not a penny less”. Also bear in mind that you are offering them a service. You’re the one doing them the favour of creating something for them, they are merely paying for your time. It’s quite a blunt standpoint, but it took me many years to get to this!
