How Do Web Designers / Developers Price Their Work?

By George
Posted Saturday, November 6, 2004

One of the first and most important issues a freelance must address is how much to charge for their services. If you’re interested to know what are the necessary elements to consider while quoting for a project, you’ve come to the right place. This article can serve as a reference to both buyers and bidders.

There is more than one method each individual determine the price of a particular project. Depending on each individual, some might charge by the hour or by the total cost of the project.

Hourly charges are the easiest for the service providers and eliminate the possibility of losing money on a job. However, hourly charges are often not acceptable to the client for several reasons. First of all, buyer generally wants to know how much a particular project is going to cost.

The next problem is that most buyers don’t understand hourly rates. Luckily at Vezine Content Management, all quotes are base on the total cost of the project; hence, this confusion had been eliminated.

The key to an accurate estimates lies in clearly defining the scope of the project, breaking the project into small individual tasks, and finally, estimating the time required to complete each of these tasks. It is essential for buyers to provide as much information of the project as possible.

Then lock in the scope of the project with a written contract or agreement. Seller should make sure buyer understands any work outside of the agreement will be billed separately.

Purchasing Pre Made Software

Often then not, purchasing a pre made software is better and more cost effective than hiring a personal developer. Although some pre made software are near but can’t meet your expectation, you are well better off go ahead and purchase the software which nearly meets what you want and ask for some custom fine tuning by the developers of the software.

Using this method, you can benefit by having a better-built system since the developers are already familiar with their own software and since they are already in business, you don’t have to worry about being scam.

For example, I recently bought Vezine Content Management software, which the features nearly meet, what I want but not totally. I still went ahead and bought it and ask the Vezine developers for some custom works. They are more than happy to help me accomplish what I need for my website.

Their charges are extremely reasonable especially when it comes to built bits and pieces, which could sum up to 10K++. Overall, the system works great for me now. Everything works beautifully and as what I expected.

Conclusion

Whether to find a personal developer or to buy a pre made software is up to you. This article is here to gives you an insight of my experience.

Good luck!

About the Author
George as a Web Designer has been involved with numerous server side programming with PHP and MySQL in the past and current. Visit Vezine Articles for more info.