How much do I charge for this website

[davebl]

Hello guys (and gals),

I have recently made a website for our family restaurant. My very kind uncles decided to pay me.

Unforunately, I have never made a website like this before, so I do not know how much to charge. This is family, so I don't have to make a living off of this site, nor is it my full time job (the restaurant is!). But he asked me to bill him, so I just need a fair estimate.

the url is http://www.wholehogcafe.com

Please let me know what you pro's think. I am always up for making the site better. I will say that we have some changes to make, as we have added franchises, and we are working on shopping cart as well.

Thanks to everyone who helps!

 

[rainman::|:|]

this is entirely me, others will have different viewpoints and pricing ideas.

i charge $120/hr for website design. i started at $40/hr when i was amateur. but i never billed for the actual amount, because i would spend hours trying to get something *exactly* right, or fighting with my computer. clients don't want to pay $1000 because you got that logo just right, because they don't share my anal perfection drive.

if you've never done this before, and it's family, i'd charge $100.

will be interesting to hear what others say. i'm probably lowballing.

edit: free updates are hard to price. i wouldn't, from a business standpoint, grant free unrestricted updates for any site less than $1500-2000. but, again, this is family. i'd say, as a token, if you were going to do the website anyway, $100 still seems fair... from a family point of view.

edit 2: the next time i'm through, i'm definitely eating there, looking at the menu.

paul

 

[mnkeybsness]

nice, simple, and easy to understand. good job with that one.

i agree with paul that you should charge a flat rate for the first few sites you do.

the first few websites i made i refused to take any money at all as they were more learning experiences for myself than anything else.

personally, for this particular site, i would have trouble justifying taking $100 for it. i would say that $100 is the most you should probably take for it. reasons being that it's just a simple html site without any really complex scripts that you had to write personally. if you did the logo, then $100 would be a perfect price, but otherwise, i would take it down to no more than $75.

 

[mrjamin]

I charge daily now, depending on my client's budget, and whether the website will gain extra revenue for the client. If the client just wants an internet presence, then my prices are low. If they're going to use the website to make extra cash (ecommerce for example) then my prices go up, significantly. $100 sounds fair to me for someone in your position and the size of the site.

Good work though; nice and simple, consistent and easy to get around.

My only piece of advice is resize the images using some image editting software to the size you have labelled them in the HTML. For example, the photo of the front of the shop is (in the HTML) 240px * 190px, but the image itself is twice that size at 475px * 393px. It's also 35kb. For a dialup user, this would take 7 seconds to load just the image (assuming 5kb/s transfer rate), have 2 images like that on a page, add that to other images and the HTML and you're looking at 30s just to load one page. Also, the browser 'resizes' the image in a pretty crude (linear? i dunno) way so it doesn't look too great either. This will make your site more accessible to all users, decrease your bandwidth and speed up the website for all users, as well as improving the look of your images.

 

[4409723]

Following on from mrjamin
The little pictures on this page: http://www.wholehogcafe.com/locations.html

are actually sizable pictures and took about 30 seconds to load on my DSL.

 

[mrjamin]

something a little weird going on here:

 

[davebl]

hmmm...

I do believe that I need to redo some graphics. I was trying to make some thumbnails for our locations page, but as you all noticed it didn't turn out quite as planned.

I'll have to just photoshop those to smaller sizes then.

BTW, thanks to everyone for the input. I really do appreciate it.

dave

 

[cubist]

Yum!

But does the menu have to be in PDF? I don't like PDF, it's slow. And what's the unclickable "Little Rock" on the Menu page?

 

[GovornorPhatt]

It would be cool if you made a panoramic photo with Photoshops's Photomerge feature for the locations page. Maybe you could show a link to a map with driving directions. http://www.mapquest.com and maps.yahoo.com/ both have documentation on making urls to link directely to their maps. Compress the images and you have a good site.