Here’s a real case study:

A website designer has been requested by a client to create a hair salon website. It will be done using xsitepro with a custom header graphic. There will be quite a few photos that will need editing, a couple of videos made, similar to commercials for the client’s salon as well. Using xsitepro, I’m not using a generic template for this website. You can, but for this I am building the header graphic and adding panels to create the website so that it is 100% unique to her and what she wants. Everything is being built using xsitepro, but nothing is generic as the templates are.

When it came to discussing the pricing, the web designer had no idea what the going rate is. Do most web builders charge per hour or by project/ fixed?

Once you have accessed the requirements and tasks, you should make a decision based on that. If the project only requires minor changes, then it would be easier to gauge the total number of hours and quote the client up front. The advantage of this kind of billing is that it allows the client and web designer to better gauge the price, clarified and agreed upon before the work starts.

Pricing by hour in most cases refers to building a website on a larger scale, that you forsee taking more than a few weeks to complete. This provides more ease to a client who will pay you weekly/ monthly after the delivery of each milestone, as oppose to being billed one lump sum, for example, at the end of 3 months time.

You can check out local prices of web designing services, plus you can try different ways to check out what you should charge:

1. Check out web hosting advertisements in newspapers and check out their rates.
2. Try online search for local web hosting FREELANCER or small company and get idea about what they charge per website and what they deliver.
3. Contact a few freelancers or small company in your area and POSE yourself as customer and ask their quote for the said work which you are going to deliver to your client.

In my opinion, pricing comes down to your skillset. The spot on, error free, sick design, bad ass sales verbiage, proper CSS, done right the first time rate is $100 an hour. From there you just adjust your rate down (if need be). Compare your work to others. Hopefully you send traffic to your own pages and know how they perform. You’ve got to try to get a balance between what you think your skills are worth in the marketplace and what you need to earn to make it worth your while. Once you’ve got an idea of your hourly rate you can start to work out (or make an educated guess) how long its going to take you.

We find that clients always want a fixed price quote rather than an open ended charge for time. Make sure you draw up some sort of project specification where you very clearly state what you’re going to do for the money and put time limits on modifications, etc. so you don’t end up being strung along for months tweaking every last bit. We usually give clients 14 days for final tweaks. If they can’t get their act together in that time (making sure you respond promptly) they start paying for mods.