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Need some help from a web developer

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

NewWorld

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Hi guys, been a while since I posted last, basically since my last post I started a web development company.
Long story short in a month I have a few clients now which are mostly just friends and family. I finished up with a clients website and I'm looking to get him to put me on a retainer for things such as website upkeep, marketing, SEO, social media etc.

What would be a fair price to charge for this? I was thinking in the ball park of about 250-500 (aud). It would be great to get some feedback. Please take into consideration this is my girlfriends fathers business haha.
 
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etrey

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It really depends on the amount of value you are going to be providing, and maybe also what you charged for the upfront. When it comes to websites, in the past I would charge a larger upfront and a similar figure for "basic hosting and minimal upkeep"

If you'll be handling SEO (since you're new I wouldn't recommend it), or Advertising this could be MUCH higher.
 

NewWorld

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It really depends on the amount of value you are going to be providing, and maybe also what you charged for the upfront. When it comes to websites, in the past I would charge a larger upfront and a similar figure for "basic hosting and minimal upkeep"

If you'll be handling SEO (since you're new I wouldn't recommend it), or Advertising this could be MUCH higher.
Thanks for the reply! Have you been doing websites for long?

The base price was very cheap in comparison to the competition based on the amount of work it was (70+ page I did him a solid for 1.5k, regret it now but too late)

I was thinking about learning how to do SEO better than I currently can but in the mean time outsource it to a friend's company who will do me a good deal at the moment.

Anyway I will pretty much be in charge of the complete online presence of his business which ,bar my website,is non existent so you can imagine the work. I'll also be doing his marketing materials such as brochures, building ads etc.
 

etrey

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Have you been doing websites for long?

So that's a really long answer, short answer ~12 years. It was my "summer job" in high school. For a 70+ page site, I would charge WAY MORE.

In high school, I was charging ~$2k for a site. Prices vary now but for a 5 pager I charge ~$12k. However, this includes strategy and video/pics (sometimes).

If you're going to be doing upkeep on a 70+ page site, you need to charge more monthly. However, considering the situation with your gf's dad you'll need to think about this.

Essentially I've allowed customers to pay me a small upfront and a similarly priced monthly charge to "rent" the site. Maybe that's something to consider here.

In this industry pricing is ALL OVER THE PLACE. This happens because of Squarespace/GoDaddy/etc, especially smaller local businesses have their aunt/uncle/cousin say they "can make a website"
 
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Ika

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Hi guys, been a while since I posted last, basically since my last post I started a web development company.
Long story short in a month I have a few clients now which are mostly just friends and family. I finished up with a clients website and I'm looking to get him to put me on a retainer for things such as website upkeep, marketing, SEO, social media etc.

What would be a fair price to charge for this? I was thinking in the ball park of about 250-500 (aud). It would be great to get some feedback. Please take into consideration this is my girlfriends fathers business haha.
Hey NewWorld, congrats on already getting clients (and having a 1500 project!)

The price highly depends on your pricing-technique.
Do you want to charge for input (I've spent 40 hours and built a website) or do you want to charge for output (I've built a website and thus generated X new customers).

If you choose the first techinque, you have to estimate the hours you are going to put in and find a hourly rate you and your client are comfortable with.

If you choose the second one, you have to look at the value you are going to bring your client.
@Fox talks about this in his Webdevelopment thread:
Let's say you have two clients, and you spend 30h each to build the websites (curate the social media profiles, optimize for search engines..).
The first client is a barber, and he earns 20 bucks per customer.
The second client is an industrial oil cleaning service, making 150.000 per customer.

You would not charge the same price for both websites, even though you've spent the same hours.


Regardless of which method you choose, you definetly have to set the boundaries of your work from the start on. Your client needs to have an understanding of the work's scope.
Offpage SEO can mean "entering the domain in industry registers" or "finding influencial websites, creating content to upload, create partnerships" - different tasks, different extends.



Another problem is that you've already worked for a price, and if you are charging a higher price, you have to justify this upsell.

This video by @SinisterLex might help:
How to Upsell from low Rates
The basic idea: How important is this client?

In your situation there are two perspectives; your business and your "private relationship".
How will your business suffer if your price is too high?
How will your private relationship with him (and thus with your girlfriend) suffer if you end the working relationship?
 

NewWorld

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@Fox sorry if this is inapproiate but I thought I'd ask you here for some help. Mostly everything I have done so far has been from learning from you. If you can share any information on this i would greatly appreciate it
 

NewWorld

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Aug 1, 2016
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Hey NewWorld, congrats on already getting clients (and having a 1500 project!)

The price highly depends on your pricing-technique.
Do you want to charge for input (I've spent 40 hours and built a website) or do you want to charge for output (I've built a website and thus generated X new customers).

If you choose the first techinque, you have to estimate the hours you are going to put in and find a hourly rate you and your client are comfortable with.

If you choose the second one, you have to look at the value you are going to bring your client.
@Fox talks about this in his Webdevelopment thread:
Let's say you have two clients, and you spend 30h each to build the websites (curate the social media profiles, optimize for search engines..).
The first client is a barber, and he earns 20 bucks per customer.
The second client is an industrial oil cleaning service, making 150.000 per customer.

You would not charge the same price for both websites, even though you've spent the same hours.


Regardless of which method you choose, you definetly have to set the boundaries of your work from the start on. Your client needs to have an understanding of the work's scope.
Offpage SEO can mean "entering the domain in industry registers" or "finding influencial websites, creating content to upload, create partnerships" - different tasks, different extends.



Another problem is that you've already worked for a price, and if you are charging a higher price, you have to justify this upsell.

This video by @SinisterLex might help:
How to Upsell from low Rates
The basic idea: How important is this client?

In your situation there are two perspectives; your business and your "private relationship".
How will your business suffer if your price is too high?
How will your private relationship with him (and thus with your girlfriend) suffer if you end the working relationship?
Thank you for this

I'll sleep on it as it's 12 20 am here.

I think you're right though, his business is international and his products are anyway I'm excess of 700 dollars per unit.

Hell be the first in our area using the sort of stuff I'm doing for him in his industry. I should weigh this all up. We discussed it yesterday and I need to present something tomorrow so hopefully when I get back here tomorrow morning I can think better about what you have said and hopefully more people get in touch.

Thank you for your posts and I'll keep you updated!
 
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Fox

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Aug 19, 2015
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Hi guys, been a while since I posted last, basically since my last post I started a web development company.
Long story short in a month I have a few clients now which are mostly just friends and family. I finished up with a clients website and I'm looking to get him to put me on a retainer for things such as website upkeep, marketing, SEO, social media etc.

What would be a fair price to charge for this? I was thinking in the ball park of about 250-500 (aud). It would be great to get some feedback. Please take into consideration this is my girlfriends fathers business haha.

Can you provide more details?

70 pages is a lot. I have done like 12 max I think.
Most companies will not need that many unless they are listing product items or its ecommerce - I try to stay clear of both of these areas.

If the site is very large and you are unsure of what is involved I would just do it by the hour. These sort of jobs aren't really profitable anyway so it is much better to have a safer structure that is very clear to both parties. Trying to guess how long 70 pages will take is very difficult.

Moving forwards I would adjust your focus - try do smaller sites for bigger businesses. There is more leverage and the rewards are bigger.

I am trying to think of an analogy - maybe the difference between doing one cool painting (creative and high value) and painting 70 walls the same color (tedious manual work). You want to be adding value through what results you got, not how much you work did.
 

NewWorld

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Aug 1, 2016
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Can you provide more details?

70 pages is a lot. I have done like 12 max I think.
Most companies will not need that many unless they are listing product items or its ecommerce - I try to stay clear of both of these areas.

If the site is very large and you are unsure of what is involved I would just do it by the hour. These sort of jobs aren't really profitable anyway so it is much better to have a safer structure that is very clear to both parties. Trying to guess how long 70 pages will take is very difficult.

Moving forwards I would adjust your focus - try do smaller sites for bigger businesses. There is more leverage and the rewards are bigger.

I am trying to think of an analogy - maybe the difference between doing one cool painting (creative and high value) and painting 70 walls the same color (tedious manual work). You want to be adding value through what results you got, not how much you work did.
I have already done the site for him, and the total span of the project was 75 pages.

So what he wants me to do is completely manage his site (add more products in if they come, do all the general website maintenance stuff), do his online marketing ( all big social media + ads).

So instead of doing them project by project, i want to have a set fee per month to do this, what would be a fair price to have me on board as the person who controls his whole online presence.
 

Fox

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I have already done the site for him, and the total span of the project was 75 pages.

So what he wants me to do is completely manage his site (add more products in if they come, do all the general website maintenance stuff), do his online marketing ( all big social media + ads).

So instead of doing them project by project, i want to have a set fee per month to do this, what would be a fair price to have me on board as the person who controls his whole online presence.

It is so hard to say...
- How many hours per week/month?
- What is the value for him?
- What results can you create?
- What is your experience level in all these different areas?

You don't have to answer these because I still won't pick a price but my point is there are a lot of variables. I would focus on what value you can create and then take a certain % of that. If you can increase sales $5,000 every month then maybe take $1,000 (simple example). If you are unsure what value you are creating then do it at an hourly rate and see how it goes. These are all suggestions - there is no fixed method on how to price.
 
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NewWorld

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Aug 1, 2016
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Hi guys, it been over 1 year since I last posted... lol :)

An update!

First off the relationship between my gf and I went sour causing me to lose the client. (don't worry, I learnt how easily replaceable and transient relationships are and how my own growth in life is the most important thing).

Secondly for any new people I want to stress how important learning a skill and selling it is... every other business I have wanted to go into henceforth required a huge paywall I simply wouldn't be able to overcome bar a huge time investment and some thrifty actions, all of which can be solved if I had some capital to play with....

Lastly, the client I had ended up needing more jobs done ( a second site made, more content adding in monthly etc.) all in all I ended up:
1: Making a total profit of around $10,000(half from big site building chunks and the other half from monthly upkeep)
2. The client made around $300,000 a month in sales revenue at my time of leaving, which wasn't just due to my site but my site played its role.
3. I learnt that no matter how much you read up, you will experience issues so particular to you, you'll spend a large portion of your time trying to figure out a solution(your client will not understand how removing the background colour has screwed your whole sites format and how it has taken you this long to fix it); my advice would be to find a website that has your particular thing implemented, search the source code and just copypasta.

All in all, I'm very happy with my experience and would like to thank everyone for helping me thus far.

If anyone wants any tips newbie to newbie I'm happy to pay it forward. Although im not yet making hundreds of thousands p/m, i did have months where my other businesses plus that client were making me 5 figures in a month (which for a 20 something middle class "kid" is pretty good. Although I built a gaming computer, with all the bells and whistles(why does my keyboard even need to strobe the rainbow?) with my first paycheck which I highly do not recommend... hence why I said kid.. not man)

@Fox @Ika @etrey
 

Fox

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Hi guys, it been over 1 year since I last posted... lol :)

An update!

First off the relationship between my gf and I went sour causing me to lose the client. (don't worry, I learnt how easily replaceable and transient relationships are and how my own growth in life is the most important thing).

Secondly for any new people I want to stress how important learning a skill and selling it is... every other business I have wanted to go into henceforth required a huge paywall I simply wouldn't be able to overcome bar a huge time investment and some thrifty actions, all of which can be solved if I had some capital to play with....

Lastly, the client I had ended up needing more jobs done ( a second site made, more content adding in monthly etc.) all in all I ended up:
1: Making a total profit of around $10,000(half from big site building chunks and the other half from monthly upkeep)
2. The client made around $300,000 a month in sales revenue at my time of leaving, which wasn't just due to my site but my site played its role.
3. I learnt that no matter how much you read up, you will experience issues so particular to you, you'll spend a large portion of your time trying to figure out a solution(your client will not understand how removing the background colour has screwed your whole sites format and how it has taken you this long to fix it); my advice would be to find a website that has your particular thing implemented, search the source code and just copypasta.

All in all, I'm very happy with my experience and would like to thank everyone for helping me thus far.

If anyone wants any tips newbie to newbie I'm happy to pay it forward. Although im not yet making hundreds of thousands p/m, i did have months where my other businesses plus that client were making me 5 figures in a month (which for a 20 something middle class "kid" is pretty good. Although I built a gaming computer, with all the bells and whistles(why does my keyboard even need to strobe the rainbow?) with my first paycheck which I highly do not recommend... hence why I said kid.. not man)

@Fox @Ika @etrey


Great progress overall. What are you working towards next - what do you need help with?
 

NewWorld

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Aug 1, 2016
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Great progress overall. What are you working towards next - what do you need help with?
At the moment I'm looking to both scale that business(finding ways to get more clients) and also looking more into social media marketing and selling products from Asian manufacturers.
I'm more interested in the latter simply because my future goals align with learning that particular set of skills.

Tbh if you could point me in the right direction to solve those two problems I am having that would be great.

I'd love to do another post about how that goes.
 
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