If you needed a website designed/coded professionally, how much would you be willing to pay?
If you wanted a professional graphic designed such as a logo, a signature, a banner, or a background how much do you think a fair set price would be for each?
If you were to find a website that could do such a thing, how would you want to stay informed by the progression of the work that's being done for you? (IE: Live Chat, Ticket system, email only, all of the above, etc.)

We're getting ready to release a website that does all of this for you. I won't go too much in detail, but I will say that the progression we've had so far is coming along outstandingly well, and has far exceeded my expectations.

I understand a lot of people think they're good at Photoshop or coding, etc. But keep in mind that the people you're buying from are professionals, not just people who dab at this shit. These guys have already been/are going to school for digital media. You get what you pay for, so keep that in mind when answering those questions. All your input is appreciated!

It depends, are we talking about custom exclusive designs? or are we talking about designs that can be re-used?

We are talking about custom/exclusive designs. Designs that nobody else in the world has. These projects are tailored to your mind.
You come to the website, you speak with a professional.
You tell professional what you want done to a "T".
Professional designs the project, shows you a rough-draft.
You make additional notes to professional.
Professional edits project to a "final".
Professional updates you with the final. You like the final.
You send $X, and you get the source image.

Also, do you think that what you pay for should be the project image alone, with the availability to buy the source-files for a small fee (like $5.00 or even less depending on the total project) or should it include the source-files, such as .PSD's etc by default?

acid those questions are hard to answer, because it comes down to the complexity of each design. i've had website creators give me ranges from $1500-$5000. but that is to build a business site. if we're talking small "i want to blog" type sites it would probably be less, and you could get someone's 10-year-old little brother to create it.

if you are charging for images and such, you could provide the concept image/drawing for free, but DO NOT provide any source files without requiring the client to pay or you are shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to income. and again, the cost will depend on the complexity of the design and how much time it took to create. if you have a flat rate, then i'm going to rape you when you make my shit, and pay you $5 for something that takes you 20 hours to make :)

i am interested to see how this turns out, because i have a website idea that my parents and i are going to launch together sometime this year. and i will need help building the site, mananging the data, and possibly creating logos. this is something i was going to approach fomenta about due to all the data. i will be following this thread :)

I agree with purple. Depending on the complexity and the requirements of the website you're building you would be able to gauge your price. If it were a really good web designer I could see anywhere between $30-40 an hour.

As for business structure why not make a cover charge of like some amount for the rough draft, and if they like that then you can proceed if not, you didn't waste time screwing around with the rough draft because you still got money for it :)

A few points, based on my understanding that you're delivering website design/logo mockups with the final product being an image file:

1) Most small business owners trying to get a web presence have been burned by college students like me (or relatives, or friends) who accept the job and then never deliver, or under-deliver. Make sure you display that you guys follow thru, get the jobs done on time, and do high quality work.

3) If you're not willing to send people to the place of business to do on-site consults, an hourly rate would be silly. Stick with a flat rate per-consult. Initial consult for the rough draft? $125. Another iteration based on more input? $125. etc etc. Most business people have $125 to throw at anything they want without having to run it by capital approvers. You'd also be within the range of home/small business.

5) If it's just you, make sure you're not puffing up your feathers by referring to yourself as "we" in the promotional section. If it is indeed you & a team, let your potential customers know who's on the team.

11) Consider the most successful tattoo shop websites as a decent template if you're going to allow customers to choose their artist.

33) Reserve your right to use the final products for portfolio purposes.

34) If I commissioned you for some work, I'd want to keep track via some sort of ticket system assuming I had multiple jobs into you. This way I could log in to your site to retrieve my artwork as much as I wanted. I'd want a phone number to call in case I felt something was off track. E-mail would be necessary but not as much as phone. Live chat even less necessary.

I'll ask my girlfriend tonight if she wants to add any input. She is a graphics coordinator for our DoT here and she was doing freelance web design before that.

One thing I would definitely suggest is doing one or two projects at no to low cost and building a portfolio with full examples your customers can see. I would never pay anybody for a design if I hadn't seen previous work that I like. Dirk's tattoo parlour example works well here.

In general, the other good way of finding out what to charge (other than asking the customer, which is hard) is to ask your competition. Call em up, pretend to be an interested possible customer and see what their rates are.

You could even use this data in a comparison matrix vs. the big boys in the web design space to show that you're services come with more value.

Thanks guys for the great responses, with that being said I'll show you just some of the work we've been doing so far. This is about a week's worth of work. Everything was modified in photoshop, and php was designed from the ground-up.

Here's a look before the PSD was edited: http://www.digitalimpulsedesign.com/test
Here's a look after: http://www.digitalimpulsedesign.com/test/mike/

Completely re-designed, and re-coded. This is a rough draft of our website currently. There's a LOT of work in progress on this, such as a new header image, more coding for the quick portfolio section, and a few other rinky-dink things here and there.

Some things we plan/don't plan on doing:

We all work on projects together. More collaboration means a more satisfied customer. If a customer does ask for a specific design, we'll let the one who's better at producing that design work more freely on that design. But I'd like to consider how we work as a production-line. One does the coding, the other does graphics, etc.
I refer to us as "we", because "we" are four of us. I think most people are happier that an entire team is working on their project instead of one guy.
We've done a few comparisons to a couple small companies, and they offer sites for about $175. They ask that you pay about half of that for a cover-charge, and they use all the work for their portfolios as well, which we also intend to do.
We are also looking into picking up a freelance account at getafreelance.com. This will help with our portfolio, and help pay off the VPS we rented out. Once it's payed off, everything else is pure profit.
We intend to release tutorials out to the public on how to do certain things with designing websites/graphics/media at
http://tutorials.digitalimpulsdesign.com - It's a blog set up to release flash videos we create on how to make stuff!
We have a forum set up to discuss graphic editing and media design at: http://forums.digitalimpulsedesign.com
We have a Ticket support system set up using OsTicket at: http://clients.digitalimpulsedesign.com - Clients can keep track of their projects as we work on them.
We also offer live chat support just in case a customer wants to get a quick response on how we do stuff/protocol at: http://www.digitalimpulsedesign.com/chat

How's it sounding so far?

I'm glad that you have portfolio's right there and visible. Some dicks like to keep their portfolio semi-hidden or completely hidden to where you have to express interest to get their link that isn't navigable from anywhere on the site.

I can't check out your links yet, cause I'm on my phone, but I'll check it all out tonight. This is really exciting stuff, and is very timely with the web ideas I've been having. And $175 is cheap! What kind of site does that get?

Looks real good -- better than a lot of the templates I've come across -- but get rid of all that ugly javascript and replace it with CSS (a {...} and a:hover{...}).

Also, get rid of the tables and use <div>s and replace sliced images that are a single color with either a repeating pixel for faster downloads (web 1.0 style) or simply a div with the background attribute set.

Remember:
-- HTML = content
-- CSS = presentation
-- JavaScript = behavior

If you want some ideas of how people use CSS check out http://www.oswd.org

PS have you decided on whats going to set you guys apart from the other web dev shops?

My favorite css site: http://www.csszengarden.com/

I could spend hours there just clicking on stuff.

Great ideas fomenta, I'll be looking into switching the javascript over to CSS, and hopefully we can get rid of the Java alltogether. The original website we had used 1px backgrounds, and this was just a quick imageready slice to get an idea on the actual "look" of the website in general, but we will be using 1px backgrounds as well. This also means the tables will be gone.

Essentially, http://www.digitalimpulsdesign.com/index.php code will be what is used on the new design, (which are all divs).

In another note: I think we've already established by our work ethics how we're different from other dev shops. Here's a couple examples:

1. Instant support. If you use our live chat or ticket system, the emails are dispersed to our support@digitalimpulsedesign.com email. The email has a forwarder set up to email each member, basically the same way n00bfest works. Once a potential client sends an email, an autoresponder replies back letting them know we got their email, and it'll be answered as soon as possible. One of the key factors that clients and potential clients alike love to see, is that they can get a price instantly. We're working on being able to make set prices for "most regular designs" as well as pre-done templates. Our clients and potential clients can use our support ticket system, our email, or contact us instantly through chat to get a quote.

2. Our prices are extremely low! We can design websites like these within a couple days or two, and have them coded. If we pull 2 jobs a week at $175, that's $350 a week, and $1400 a month. At that rate, we could really take more designs in. In the meantime, we'll be doing smaller graphics, like signatures and status sigs for around $5-$20 each depending on what needs to be done. These smaller designs may more than likely go towards the purchase of better support features including a business telephone with a forwarder setup.

3. Availability of our portfolio. When potential clients come to our website, they instantly see on the top of the page some work we've done. What better way to show our customers how we can work than to design our own website from the ground-up! Everything we plan to use for our website MUST be home-made. We don't want to take someone else's work, change it up, and then call it ours. We intend to make our mark by showing our competition that they can't beat our quality of work at our rates.

4. Knowledgeable staff. Our members who work under DID can speak English. They can TYPE using proper punctuation and grammar. They are professional at all times, and know how to work with customers who are or might be upset. Providing a well educated staff with people skills is an absolute must. Billy-Bob can code 83 pages of PHP in 4 minutes, but he can't answer a telephone call without saying "dude". Cut. Our staff can work in any position at any time, and keeping the flow and flexibility allows us to become one of the best companies out there. All of the staff members at DID have had some education in digital media, or coding. (College, High-School, etc.) These guys really know what the hell they are doing, and inside the PSD file, the workflow looks amazing, not cluttered up like someone who just started this job a week ago.

5. We're all from n00bfest! (Except one, and he's a douche for F*CKING up that statement...) All of our staff are very close to each other personally, and get along with each other regardless of what happens. You can't beat that kind of environment, honestly. There's nothing like working at a place you enjoy more than anything because of the people you work with. Honestly, how many people can say they enjoy going to work, and getting screamed at by their boss? n00bfest members are hardened to the F*CKING core, and we can take criticism. I've had issues before taking it, but I've gotten 100% better, and take all criticism I get for what it's worth. I know our team can do this. In one week we've set up the entire website/coding/and most of the design, with only minor graphic tweaks, code-tweaks, and doo-dads like adding forums and such to our phpbb 3 sub-domain. Our members have experience in SEO, and advertising. We won't throw shit on our website that won't sell. We won't say shit on our site that won't sell!

I know you want to buy already, I can smell it in your eyes...

my webdesign skills are amature at best, but ive worked in customer service for going on 7 years now. and there is no harder customer to deal with than a pissed off flag officer whos black berry stopped working, so i would assume that i have a good deal of knowledge on that subject.

as far as ticket tracking, if its not there already, i would suggest a running work log filled in by the developer with a timestamp explaining what was accomplished. as well, a rough but realistic ETA for the product. for the ticket system we use, it cuts our phone calls and emails down by nearly half. a majority of customers just want to know a status and ETA. you would hardly ever get calls about anything else until after the product has been delivered.

as for the live chat and phone number, i would cut out the chat and just use email and a seperate phone dedicated for that business. from what it sounds like, i dont think you have the manpower to run that if your site takes off. save it and keep it for later, then upgrade as the need arises. email should do just fine, and the phone would be there for more of a trust icon. i know i wouldent order from any business that diddnt disclose thier phone number to me. i would instead turn the live chat into something of a business oriented collab machine. use it for meetings and to speak to eachother. hell any chat program is good for that.

it looks nice and spiffy, and for a future plan, i would recomend a flash /shockwave intro when you get enough images for your portfolio.

if you would like, id be willing to shell out some dime to get some images set up and possably a stand alone website for n00bfest radio. im interested to see where this goes. makes me proud to be a member of this community when i hear about shit like this....brings a tear to my eye it does

i have had to hire a web designer to build this site for my company/class i ran for nearly a year. and yes it is a real business here at my college.

his going rate was $125 an hour...
it took him around 40 hours to build and get it up and running.
40*125=5,000 is what we paid him...

you can decide for yourself the level of complexity
http://www.sake.org

p.s. it was the best deal we could find in our area. and i think its more than resonable for any company that is looking to have a prefessional site build.


and we kept in touch via email and 3 face-to-face meetings...
1 to set the project up and go over the requierments, plans, etc.

1 half way through once the skelleton was build and the site was semi funtioning

and 1 when the site was fully up and running to find/fix the little nit picky things to customize it to our full likeing

It looks like for now, we may cut the chat program out, and stick with email/tickets. We can't afford a phone right now, but we'll look into it for future. If everything works the way we like it, we'll be able to afford one in no time!

I would have probably charged about 50 dollars to make that site. That shit looks easy as hell.

The design of that site isn't the greatest, but it looks like it's databased. I was gonna say, $5k is a steal if he set you guys up with CC processing, but he just went the paypal route. $5k for a databased business site that you guys run yourselves (i.e., you add new items, pictures, etc via an easy interface) is a very decent deal. I've done sites like those for free, but they were for chicks I wanted to bang.

Have you considered using a Skype phone number to start with?

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