TutsArena

Setting A Price For Your Design

by TutsArena - Articles

There’s no doubt that today’s design market is saturated, with many designers charging rock bottom prices for sub-par designs. Some designers don’t understand the dynamics of pricing a design so they charge what they think it’s worth. We’ll explain why that’s bad for everyone. Come on in.

Setting A Price For Your Design

If you’re just starting out or have been around the block before, freelancing is a tough job. You’re the designer, the pitchman and the salesman and being three places at once isn’t easy. We’re not trying to discourage you, merely explain what the job entails.

Many new designers feel their work isn’t worth enough to charge higher prices and I know this because I was in those shoes a few years ago. The simple fact is that if a client chooses you to design a website, it’s because they like your work.

The first step in setting a price for your design is to ask the client some basic questions.

• How complex is the design going to be?
• How many pages are going to be designed?
• Do you need a logo designed?
• Any Flash or other multimedia?
• Will there be any complex coding involved?

With those answers, you can begin to formulate a price – but we’re not done yet.

• When does the client want the website completed?
  Tighter time restraints cause prices to tick up.
• Are you going to provide support? For how long?
  Often, you’ll set up the website to work correctly on the clients’ host.  You can add value by offering support for, say, up to one year.
• What is the current market price?
  You don’t want to undersell your competition, after all, we’re all in this together.  Underselling causes prices to deflate and that hurts everyone.

Now set a base hourly price for yourself and figure out how long you expect  it to take to complete each task.  Theoretically, we’ll charge $25/hour.

Client’s Specifications

I don’t really want a flashy website, just something clean and professional, something like MSN.com and I only need 2 pages, a main page and a sub page.  I need a logo and I am going to need a flash intro for my site and some flash buttons for the navigation.  I just need basic coding done, nothing extravagant.  I need it completed in one week.

Your Price

Design complexity: Basic
12 hours
Amount of pages: 2
6 hours
Logo design:  Yes
6 hours
Flash design: Yes (intro and nav)
6 hours
Coding: Yes, HTML and CSS
16 hours

For this basic website, we’re looking at 46 hours of work, or 4 solid days.  Since the client wants it done within a week, you can charge more for your time.  We’ll tack on an extra $10 which brings us to $35 an hour for this design.  After checking the market price for this type of site, we notice we’re within the ballpark and we’ve decided to give the client two months of support just in case something goes wrong.

The total price tag for this project: $1610.00

So you can see, things add up quickly and you shouldn’t be afraid to charge what you feel you’re worth.  After all, the client is paying not just for the design but for your time.  You don’t work for free, do you?