Posted by april26 on January 29, 2013 at 9:58am
Under R10 000
0% (0 votes)
R10 000 - R15 000
0% (0 votes)
R15 000 - R20 000
25% (1 vote)
R20 000 - R30 000
50% (2 votes)
R30 000 +
25% (1 vote)
Total votes: 4
Comments
Depends what you can get?
I am coming across clients with absolutely basic Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress sites, a slightly personalised standard theme and 10 pages, and they have paid R50 000. Then there are clients who tell me they paid "a fortune" for a self-maintenance website - at least R5 000!
I know it depends on the web designers persuasive skills, but I'm wondering if I'm undercharging, overcharging or about normal?
It isn't good for our web industry in South Africa if some designers are undercutting everyone without knowing, and making the industry unsustainable. Or alternatively causing clients to think web developers no more credible than the SEO or "social media" specialists, or the spammer who want to sell you your domain name in China because someone is about to buy it!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
My "web design" rant
The more site builds I'm involved in, the more I believe that "the website" is only the artefact produced by a design process, and the costs of that process aren't merely to pay the developer, but should be spread over things like: elicitation of client's goals, deciding on a USP, creating personas, matching content to user goals, information architecture, rapid prototyping and testing of those wireframes, iterating the prototypes, creating a style guide, creating artwork, and only NOW at THIS point do we first fire up drupal and start putting modules, code and themes together.
Even better, a content-first mobile-first design approach should be used.
My opinion is this: anything else is not only doing clients a massive disservice (and doesn't build the professionalism of web design as a profession), but it is designing and developing in an outdated way that doesn't solve any real-world problems, and merely delivers a website. And that is a design failure.
Any fool can click through an open source CMS installation and choose a default theme, but to equate that to professional "web development" is crazy. We don't do this in other industries, so we shouldn't do it in web.
So, point being, clients should not be paying only for "web development" - they need to know that they are paying for a full design process, of which web development is a component.
As for me, I'm refusing to work with clients in future who don't understand this. No more "Dear web developer: here's some artwork we did in photoshop that shows what our website must look like. Go and build us that." It's insanity.