Webdesign hourly wage for a Freelancer

[Crasy_J]

Okay, I think I read this kind of question in several forums around the web but I'm really confused about that.

I'm doing Webdesign since 1998, this year I' gonna start my further education at an university specialising in art, design and communication.

In the last years I did some Jobs as a freelancer, mostly coding PHP for shopsystems and e-Print Stuff but also alot of smaller jobs like designing a front end of a webpage, redesigning some crap to make them work with the w3c-standards.

I got always paid for the whole thing and not for a hourly wage.

This morning, one of my regular customers asked me if I would like to work 10-15 hours a week to support his webpage. Of course he would like to know how much he has to spend.
And that's my point, how much schould I say.

I never cheated on my customers. Although I got some experience, read some books about how to make a webpage usable, write clean DHTML, CSS, JS, PHP and still try to improve my skills, I've never studied design or programing.

In my past projects I got an average of something about 27 Euro (that's about 24 $ I think) and I'm sure german designers aren't cheaper than the us are.

Maybe I schould add that in the past projects for this customer, he never was unsatisfied with the bill or the work, I'm wondering if I took less than I could.

So, dear forum-friends, how much should I take ???

thank you for your time and answers!

Joanna

[Crasy_J]

maybe I should also mention that I work at home.

[Zvona]

I'm doing a web-based GUI as a project. Whole project is estimated to take 60±10 hours. I'm charging only 1500€ + taxes (22%). Thus, my hourly wage is 21 - 30 euros, which can be considered decent wage. According to the fact that average male earns ~12€ / hour in Finland.

I'm doing it along with my daily work. Whenever there's nothing to do at work, I work on project. In other words, I earn double wage occasionally.

After I'm graduated and maybe gained some respect, I'll drain every cent with empty promises

[bcarl314]

Well, i think you get to choose what the market will bare (or is it bear?)

I'm working for one client that helped me get into web design. I've been with them for over a year now and since they helped me get experience on my resume I only charge them about $15 per hour for web maintenance and the like.

On the other hand, my new clients I charge $35 / hour for general programming. But if they want me to make a complete site from the ground up, I usually work out a contract for say a 10 page site for $400 bucks. Which I usually spend 10-15 hours on. So I guess that works out to about $25-40 per hour.

If it's a major site, dynamic content, database driven, and the like the I try to go with a package that hits as closely to $35 / hour that I can.

If it's a freind/family memeber I might do it for free. All depends on the situation.

PS: This post makes me a full-fledged member! Senior member here I come!

[Crasy_J]

Thank you ,


What about making different wages for different jobs like

- general webdesign (Dreamweaver, Editor)
- art work (Photoshop, Illustrator)
- client side prog. : Java Script (forms,cookies etc..)
- server side prog. : PHP, MySQL (dynamic content, mail etc..)

Does anybody know if this makes sence?


Would be cool to get many, many opinions to have an avarage hourly wage...


Thanx

[bcarl314]

IMO

I would charge in order of complexity:

Server side-$30-market
Client side-$15-35
Image Developemet-$15-30
WYSIWYG editor-$10-$25

[allida77]

Anybody can build a web site these days so rates really vary. I think it depends on your individual skill level and talent. There is definitely a difference between a $20 hr site and a $100 hr site.

Are you going to be doing maintenance or rebuilding the site? If it is just maintenance I would say around $25 - $35 hr. It sounds like you have a good relationship with them so the worst thing that could happen is you would have to lower your rate. Do not sell yourself short and make it worth your while!

[whackaxe]

i see alot of people these days make theur own web pages with easy to use WYSIWYG editors. the only problem with that is adding complexity isn really that easy. i had change a page designed with frontpage and i got completly lost in all the rubbsih fp leaves behind. i suppsoe just to make a small page for a homeopathic clinic in about 30min can get you a couple of € but if you make huge bandwidth-pumping-content-bursting-serverside-scripting-design-mindblowing pages can get quite a bit more!

[Thejavaman1]

It really depends, you can have ranges from simple HTML pages for maybe $15-$20 an hour to J2EE and Oracle which could be $150-$200 an hour. But charge based on its dificulity. Normally I would lump custom javascripts in with custom php, etc.

[mouse]

Best way to freelance is to hook up with an agency. Too many times members of the WA frum posted about being burned by dodgy clients, weak contracts, things like that. An agency can sort all that out and give you a reference at the end.

[oracleguy]

You might also consider to purpose of the site. If you have to make a small website for someone photo album, isn't going to very long compared to a site that is for e-commerce.

The e-commerce is going to have pretty heavy server-side and security coding. Which take more time.

For example I've had to build a site that is for a service that is like Geocities but without ads. They offer 35MB, PHP, MySQL, Perl, etc plus no ads or pop-ups for free. I charged $30/hour to build. It took a lot of work to get it to create an NT account on the server along with an exchange mailbox and have it all automated.

Of course if you are purely going to be maintaining the site you'd want to charge a tad less.

[whackaxe]

burned by a dodgy client? i would just make sure that i had access to the ftp serverthe site is on and "offeing" to take care of the uploading. and if ever the guy tried to con me id flush his site straight off the net replacing it buy annoying casio ads

[oracleguy]

Originally posted by whackaxe
if ever the guy tried to con me id flush his site straight off the net replacing it buy annoying casio ads