A Rule of Thumb for Pricing Websites and Web Projects

We get several inquiries for quick ball-park figures to price web projects. In many occasions the person requesting a quick ball-park quote is a small business owner.

Quite often the project budget is way too small to get anything done that will prove to be useful for them.

For example, an interior designer wants a website.

— Ideally this website should have a content management system to keep content fresh
— A design that inspires the visitor to contact the business owner.
— A gallery of work that also inspires/encourages the visitor to contact the business owner.
— SEO to ensure that the site gets targeted traffic and relevant leads.
— If there is some budget, then a SEM program to drive traffic from sponsored listings would be quite useful.

This is just to get a business launched online. The social aspects of the enterprise is another exercise.

Now this kind of a project would at least take about 2 weeks of work to accomplish, assuming design, programming, customer interactions and some customer hand-holding is required.

The price for such a project should at least compensate one resource for half a month. This is the lowest pricing bar one can set.

Many of these inquiries come with a budget that’s so tiny that its difficult to justify even a week worth of work.

I usually advise such prospects that if they wish to make money online, they should utilize someone who is also making money and is a professional.

By cutting costs in the wrong places, they are most likely to end up with somebody desperate for work and who really is not a professional.

Advising clients on the pitfalls of an inadequate budget and not taking up a job is preferable to taking up a job that is not going to get done properly and which will prove to be a waste of money for the client ultimately.

So the rule of thumb here is to put a bar on a price that at least justifies the time of a good resource/worker.