What should I charge to design and maintain a website?

Question

I designed a website for my church and maintained it for a year. Sadly, the church closed, but a few members have now asked me to design and maintain websites for them. Can anyone tell me the going rate for this? I quoted one guy for a 3 page informational site $125 set up + $5 per update. The other member I haven't sat down with, but he wants to sell greeting cards on his site.......so I"m at a loss as what to charge....thanks in advance!

Answer 1

e-commerce websites are lot more expensive than the static ones. think of how much time it takes you to build a 3-page site and figure out your hourly rate. If you have to give fixed quote to your client, you can go a bit over the calculation you end up with.

Answer 2

If someone wants to sell greeting cards, that's a lot of back end work if that person wants the customer to pay with credit card over the Internet. Also you are going to have to make the site secure. More coding. For all the work you put in you should charge at least $750. I do web sites as a hobby with Adobe Macromedia Studio MX 2004, and I put in over 50 hours in the beginning to create a 30 page web site. Once it was upload, keeping it update is a breeze. Yet to start it, takes a lot of time.

Answer 3

The Answer is how long is a piece of string. Until you knwo how big the website is going to be (the 'Scope' of the project), then you can't give a fixed rate. The website might only be 5 pages with some text or images which might take you 20 hours to complete. Or they might want videos put up on the site of their games etc, which is going to take you much longer. Work out how many hours its gong to take you to do the job, and then work out how much an hour of your time is worth. Professional Web designers/developers usually charge out at a freelance rate between $40-60 an hour. Since you are a beginner you'd be cheaper than this. Hourly rate x time taken to complete the job = $$COST