How much to charge for building website

I'm kind of in the same boat as you. Did a lot of my own sites and a few customer sites. I've spoke to people who have paid 2 to 3k for a site that I would do for 500.

And that 500 would be a very profitable and easy job for me, so it's difficult to price up.

Don't undersell yourself and keep in mind what some of the flashy web design businesses would charge.

If that particular site is on WP then I'd replicate it for 500.
 
Galdorf said:
I have been making websites for myself for years have good knowledge of wordpress how much would you charge to make a website for a business? that looks like this.
http://www.garbuttconst.com/
Click to expand...

Out of pocket costs + normal hourly rate. Usually works out around €700 - €1000 for something like the example. No point charging less for web design and then not having time to do other work.

EDIT: I missed that this was a Wordpress site. I can outsource that site to a company we use in Indonesia for US$270 approx. Enough changes to make it pass as "not a copy".
 
It depends on a lot of factors, but it should boil down to two things:

1. The cost of your estimated time spent = Factor in time to gather requirements from the client + time to research themes (if you're going to implement a theme) + the time it will take you develop it (or outsource development) + the amount of back-and-forth you're willing to do on tweaks and changes (can end up being just as long as it took you to develop it) + time to gather or write content + time to train client if you're handing it off to them (otherwise factor in the time for you to maintain it yourself). I've found that more often than not you end up spending more time on these things than you anticipate.

2. How much is an effective website worth to THEM? For example, a doctor's office website is worth much more than a website for a pottery artist who works part time out of his garage. You should charge based on the return on investment that your client will get from the site.

I do websites full-time, and I would charge between $3k-$7k for a site like that for a company like that, and it would include some basic SEO and conversion optimization as well. For someone who doesn't do this full-time, you should probably charge about half that, since you wouldn't be able to provide the same level of service as a full-time shop or agency.

Remember, websites are a combination of marketing, information, and art. It's easy to slap together a WordPress theme and call it a day, it's not as easy to implement a website that converts customers, helps the company reach it's desired business goals, and makes more money for the business. Think about what type of website you are going to give them and then charge accordingly.
 
I start at $500 for a 5-page website build. It goes up depending how much images and content is needed.
 
$299.95 is what I would charge. Customer supplies content and images. Time frame, 2 weeks as I have projects I am currently working on for other clients. I tend to work on 2-3 at a time though. :)

Honestly, it is dead simple to make a site like that. Especially when you know bootstrap.
 
The problem with websites is that it always takes longer than you expect and clients always want to change things and add things right up to the last minute. They also usually don't provide the content they promised and when they do it's terrible! I.e. it can be a lot of hassle unless you're good managing the process.

If you can get them to sign up for a straight filling in an existing WP theme with no coding and they supply content and pictures, and you're prepared for the site to look and sound a bit crap (because the photos and text they supply are not great) then a few hundred is OK. But for anything else, you need to charge more because you'll be editing photos, finding new photos, changing text and then the "actually we'd like a bar under that bit...should only take you a few minutes" requests.

I prefer to have a much greater hand in the content etc so that the you have a chance of SEO actually working. If they won't take advice as to the title of a page then that alone can ruin the SEO and then they're not happy with it.

One things I've recently discovered for Wordpress is BeaverBuilder. It's brilliant and can cut development time massively when it comes to designing page layouts. You get proper drop and drag UI for content areas. Combined with a theme that does what you want in terms of menus etc it's a massive time saver. I'd previously spent hours adding new widget areas and inserting hooks etc and then trying to sort the CSS to get the effects I wanted. with BB it's super easy. I'm looking at combining it with Studiopress and Dynamik. Dynamik allows easier editing of theme basics and you can save the results as a new child theme so it looks custom handbuilt and then do the page content with BB.
 
$2,000 to $3,000. I've never targeted cheap clients with my computer repair business and I don't target cheap clients with my website design services either. I'd rather do one website for $3,000 than have to do 10 websites at $300.
 
I know this post is older but a good one to keep up in my opinion.

I am trying to go at a longer term. Hosting + $350 for the fist month to get a web presence then $200 a month for site maintenance and content update.
 
i used to do sites like this for about $500 but i soon realized this isn't enough. i now charge minimum $1000-1500 for something like this. Dont forget you have to get/create the content, find images, setup SSL ect, get settings/plugins setup, workout layout ect - this all takes time and the customer is paying for your expertise to do it. Creating website doen't stop here - you then setup social media sites, setup sitemaps and accounts for google webmaster and anaylytics, bing, yahoo and then optimize pages for SEO - work out the companies keywords. Opt-in pages, Email Marketing. ALot of these can be addon services after initially creating the site so dont under value the time spent on it - charge for your expertise
 
Yeah, I'd say a minimum of $100/page you create. So probably around $2,000 for a site like that. Plus extra if they want any link building or other off-site SEO work.
 
As someone who used to do this, I echo YFNCG. Its not just about throwing up a Wordpress install and calling it a day. I can do that in 10 minutes.
Its not even about the time that you are creating the pages, its the time dealing with clients that you need to charge for. Websites are not something tangable and a lot of clients dont know what they want. So you need to spend time to sit down with them and find that out. What are they trying to achieve? Why do they want a website?

Then of course there is conversion and this is where most web devs fall flat. Its easy to create a Wordpress website, its a lot harder to make a website that converts (still echoing YFNCG here). A lot of people cant do this yet its pretty much the entire point of websites.

We covered this a fair bit here for technician websites, but the principles are still the same.
 
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