My Pricing

With the world economy the way it is, it is becoming much and much harder to find work for many people.

In the world of design, I have heard views from different sides discussing the impact that the economy will have on design. Some are stating that design, as a part of the marketing sector, should be quite healthy. Others, however, are pointing out that businesses will be cutting the costs, and design will be one of those areas.

I work for an SEO company during the day, and do freelance at night in order to pay the bills. It is, admittedly, very hard to find clients in this day and age, especially ones which are willing to pay a premium for a service that they can see, but honestly cannot touch or even grab, and the fact remains that not all businesses have fully embraced the power that is the Internet.

The difficult part is pricing. There are thousands of articles about how to price freelance, and they are all correct - you do not wish to come off as unsure of your skills and so you wish to price at a premium, but at the same time, you wish to be able to "score" a client or a project, but with the third addition being that you do not want to waste your time on a project that is completely useless, takes a long time, and is steeply underpriced for the amount of effort you put into it.

This is why I have decided to price my projects depending on what is included.

I am working on setting up an order form and pricing catalogue for my own packages. It is under development currently; given that I work full time on top of freelance, progress is moving slowly, but I am looking to consult Dre to split the workload, as we do with our projects already.

I would say that this gives your client the best view of what they are getting. A base price for the design, hosting, DNS, miscellaneous things (such as Internet Explorer compatibility, E-Commerce, and other programming nitty-gritties), and price per page (or set it up based upon 3-page and 5-page sites, with a base price for additional pages) would be a good starting point. As all things involved in a web designer's site are always under construction, newer features can be added to this order form - maybe you wish to offer a CSS/HTML engineering service as well, things such as that - so, what you start with can be the bare bones for you to build up on.

And, in an economy like this, it is always good for the client to be able to see why they are paying so much for what they are getting. :)