Posted by Brent Baisley on 04/04/05 17:21

That would be between $10 and $150 per hour or more. One can easily
find and hire a college kid to slap together some open source programs,
maybe throw a bit of Flash and fancy graphics on a web page and the
project is done for $10 per hour. Of course, there is no cohesiveness
or consistency to the "finished" website, and there was no reason to
use Flash code, except to say the website uses Flash. All the text is
actually graphics so there is no easy way to update the content. But
the site works and it was done in 20 hours. So what is some of the site
doesn't work if you are not using Internet Explorer under Windows, it
will work for 85% of the people.

For $150+ per hour, you would get security analysis, usability
analysis, browser testing, performance analysis and testing, adherence
to standards, project management, scalability and maintainability.
Perhaps even return on investment (ROI) estimates. The time frame will
be a lot longer than the $10 hour work, but you won't have any problems
tracking someone down to fix bugs and it will encompass things the
client hadn't thought of.

Just a motorcycle club? If it's just some graphics and a discussion
area, that's not too hard. There is a bunch of open source forum
software available. Is there going to be a mailing list? Now that's
including membership and people's personal information. You need to
take security into account, especially SQL insertion, cross-site
scripting, the hosted OS, etc.

Prices charged can be all over the place based on the talent of the
person(s) doing the work. You may choke if someone said they would come
up with a tag line for your company for only $20,000. That's not even a
website, but a one line sentence. But that's about what HBO paid for
"It's not TV, it's HBO.". In hindsight, $20k was pretty cheap.

So, what you charge depends on your talent and what needs to be done.
$20-$50 per hour is probably the most common range for someone who
doesn't really do this professionally, but knows they can do a decent
job. You can come up a project price based on your hourly rate.

Bottom line, there really is no answer. I used to charge $75 per hour
when I did consulting during the dot com era and my clients were
telling me I was charging them too little. Some even saying I should
double my rate.

On Apr 3, 2005, at 6:51 PM, -{ Rene Brehmer }- wrote:

> Hi gang
>
> Sorry for asking this question here, but I don't know where else to
> ask. And Goole'ing didn't help me much.
>
> My father-in-law has a friend in Alaska (and I'm in Canada) that needs
> a website done. Not sure what kinda site he wants done yet, or how
> much he needs me to do for him (like webspace, domain hosting, domain
> registration, and such) but for now I've been asked what it'd cost to
> get it done.
>
> I'm assuming it's something pretty simple, since it's just for a
> motorcycle club, but he wants a price first ...
>
> What do y'all charge when you do sites for people ??? ... In the past
> I've only done pro-bono work (because they usually don't require much
> work, so it's not a problem getting it done while working on other
> projects), but I've never actually done paid work before... It's more
> that I just recently moved to Canada (from Denmark) so I have no
> feeling with what the prices and rates are overhere ...
>
>
> TIA
>
> Rene
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>
--
Brent Baisley
Systems Architect
Landover Associates, Inc.
Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577

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