What to charge to develop a dynamic website

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paladaxar
Forum Commoner
Posts: 85
Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 11:50 pm

Post by paladaxar »

Thanks for all of the great tips guys...they are all really helpful.
obiron wrote:Are you doing the site design as well as the processing or are they going to use a graphics designer / content management system.
Yeah, its pretty much a one man show - granted, not the best show on earth either...yet.
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RobertGonzalez
Site Administrator
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Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2003 6:04 pm
Location: Fremont, CA, USA

Post by RobertGonzalez »

onion2k wrote:
obiron wrote:If you need to learn pagemaker / quark / flash etc... then these all take time.
Time, which, as a client I would not be willing to pay for. It's not fair to charge a client for time you spend learning how to do your job.

If you were paying someone to build a house for you would you be happy to pay them while they learnt plumbing or bricklaying or roofing? Of course not. The same goes for web development. Learn things in your own time, not in the client's time.
100% agreed. As professionals, it is our responsibility to know our stuff. I don't pay people to learn what they need to do to service me. I pay them because they already know it.

Be diplomatic, but be realistic also. You are providing a product/service that is obviously, at the very least, a want for the person that is contacting you in regards to it. It might even be a need, in which case the dollar value of the product/service should be weighed realistically against the net potential gain on that product or service. Business people know this and employ this mentality all the time. You buy what you need to make your business better, and you spend what is needed to do so as long as it is within the bounds of reason for that particular item.
jsilver608
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Joined: Wed Oct 25, 2006 4:34 pm

Post by jsilver608 »

"That drives me nuts - people who think a website should cost a couple of hundred bucks (even with new graphics!) - If after explaining everything (very diplomatically) they're still idiots, I usually tell them that maybe one of their employees has a teen-aged kid who would make them something in Word and "Save as HTML" or toss up a myspace page. "

I was a consultant for about a year (mostly php/web-based projects and for small to mid-sized companies) and I ran into this all the time.

I once had a guy get angry at me after I told him my rates were higher than $10/Hour (I didn't get the project). I have never understood why people seem to think that programmers should be paid the same as someone working at mcdonalds.

craigslist is great for finding people that don't want to pay you anything.
chrisranjana
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price of programming ?

Post by chrisranjana »

You are the only person who can decide how much are you worth.
Interpolate it into hrs and estimate the number of hrs this project will take, arrive at a sum. and ALso

add to it some dollars for the good things you are missing in life :) because of sitting in front of the computer and programming this ecommerce site :) and then you can have the FINAL price for the project.
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