My clients are passionate

My clients are not interested in get-rich-quick schemes. They are passionate about what they do and are highly motivated to work hard to achieve their dreams.

My clients are trust-worthy

Even if others in their field are manipulating and clawing their way up, my clients know that the cream always rises to the top. They are honest and have integrity in every situation.

My clients are good communicators

They are direct when they need to be, but they approach complex situations with a solution-focused attitude.

My clients are team-oriented

They realize that the designer-client relationship is a team effort. Their input and commitment to the project combined with their designer’s vision and experience will determine the successful attainment of their goals.

My clients need a designer

Yep, it sounds silly. But some people don’t need a designer. They THINK they need a designer, but what they really need is a coder. They want someone who will do exactly as they say, when they say it. They trust their own judgment more than their designer’s before the project even gets started. My clients need expert advice and creativity, and they get it.

Yesterday’s rant got me thinking about this exact thing, and it made me so thankful that we received this advice from the very beginning. It is easy to be demoralized in this profession if you are not picky about the types clients you choose to serve.

So I’m sure you’re wondering…what happened to those few “not ideal” clients that we took on? Well, I’ll tell you. We recommended them to someone else in our field who we thought would be a better fit. Seriously. Because they weren’t bad clients. They just weren’t ideal for us. And now we make it a point to work with the ones who are.

Okay, so you’re wondering why I am laughing? Well. You should read my emails some time. I get things like “Hey, I love your website re-design! It is totally awesome! I am starting this company and we need a website. We don’t have any money, but when we make millions, we will totally let you have some.”

Thanks…

And, “Hey, we need a website by Friday. Our budget is $150. We want it to be super-cool with flash and stuff.”

Yep. Sure. And design is so EASY that I’ll just whip some up for you right now.

I hate to sound snarky, but after I received the 100th “I am poor but lovable, and I’ll be your friend forever” email, I started putting up a general price guide for our services. Do I have a sign on my back? Oh dang. I guess I did. It said “Works 12 hour days for free!” Dang, dang, dang.

But seriously. I don’t go to Wal-Mart (Yep, I am poor, too. That’s why I shop at Wal-Mart.) and say, “Hey, can you give me groceries for a month? I know I’m going to be a super-star web designer one day, and then you are going to be SO glad you did.”

I think there is a conception somewhere that we designers are making a TON of money. Well, some of us are to be sure. A lot of us are not. “Well how in the heck can you NOT make money when you charge $90 an hour?!” Please…calm down. Let’s talk rationally here.

Say I have a $90 per hour design/development rate (hypothetically speaking, of course). If I had a $90 an hour rate, that would mean I’m probably running a pretty small operation. The going rate is between $75 and $250.

Let’s also consider that half of my time is billable. That means 20 of my 40 working hours are directly billable to the client (which is pretty good for a startup.) That means that I’m actually making $45 an hour.

Then let’s consider that the company has bills. Overhead, if you want the fancy term. Computers, software, transportation, advertising, promotional materials, outsourcing, etc. etc. Let’s say you run a tight ship and are left over with $30 an hour.

But THEN consider how fast the web design/development world changes. Consider how you have to keep yourself educated and all of that fun stuff. You don’t really have 40 hours a week to work, then. You might use 5 or 10 hours to keep yourself in the loop of your craft.

So then half of the LEFTOVER hours are billable. Which leaves you with maybe $25 an hour when you are blessed enough to be booked solid. The other times you’re making less. And let’s also remember that design is HARD work. Contrary to popular belief, designers do not just slap some type and pictures on a page and be done with it. There is really an art to what we do.

And I love what we do. I really, really, really do. So I’m not complaining about the profession. I’m complaining about the PERCEPTION of the profession. How do we change that, I wonder?

Such as: don’t follow a bunch of people unless you’re followed by a bunch of people. I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess it makes sense. It keeps you from looking like the desperate pseudo-popular girl in school.

And, of course: don’t just link to yourself all the time. It’s the equivalent of trying to be in EVERY yearbook picture. You know the ones.

I guess most of the rules that the article suggests boil down to one thing: don’t be an internet vampire, looking for what YOU can get out of every relationship. Authentically enjoy the medium for what it is.

Anyway, she’s completely right on the money. Funny thing is, I’d never thought about it before. And then I was reading an article by Natalie Jost that was jabbing at us webophiles for speaking above our clients…using big words to feed our superiority complex, basically. Ouch! But that was on target, too.

I’d love to say “Except for me. I’ve never done either of those things. I’m just way too cool for all of that.” But just the other day, I did it. Without even thinking, I was babbling on and on about CSS and web standards and the importance of usability…blah dee blah. I could see my listener’s eyes glazing over, but I was not about to stop. Nuh-uh. I knew what I was talking about after all.

So anyway, there’s my kick in the pants for the day. I’m going to try to go a whole week without saying “Content Management System.” Because really…that label does not help anyone at all. Except for me, apparently.

7am - Wake up. Have coffee. Just kidding. Coffee tastes bad (yes, I’m still secretly 12.) Instead, I’ll eat waffles with my family and talk about current events.

8am - Check my email. Read a really awesome one from an incredibly cool client who thinks everything I do is golden. Call client and discuss plans for a future project in which I have full creative rein. Do a happy dance. I only work with one client at a time (this is my IDEAL future, remember), so I get to be choosy with who I work with.

9am - Take a break to go on a walk outside with my kids. It’s the perfect day. 80 and sunny with a slight breeze. Bring the dog along. On my ideal day, he would actually choose to walk with us instead of drag us down the road.

9:30am - Work on my blogs. Chat with really cool people (preferably shiny…see title.)

10:30am - Eat pita chips and hummus with my kids (they really do like it.) Color. Bake stuff. Learn about why the sky is blue.

12pm - Eat lunch with my family. There will be green grapes involved.

1pm - Put kids down for nap/quiet time. Meet with John to go over our project deadlines. Record for an hour for a future animation short.

2:30pm - Read during the few moments of solitude that I have before the kids get up.

3:30pm - Everybody’s up. We are all desperate for a Tropical Smoothie. We end up making our own, and it tastes even better.

4:30pm - Add to my idea book. Connect old ideas with new ones. Make sketches for upcoming project.

5:30pm - The whole family makes dinner. Perhaps chicken wraps with black beans and rice. With tomatoes from the garden, of course. And a LOT of cheese. And dessert.

7:00pm - We all watch a movie. We eat popcorn and drink soda, possibly through Twizzler straws.

8:30pm - Put kids to bed. Clean up around the house. Eat more dessert. Read more. Go to bed early.

So hmmm. I really could be doing a lot of that stuff right now. The things I would have to subtract? Stress. Working with a bunch of clients at once. Staying up too late. Thing I would have to add? An animation studio in our home so John could work here instead of somewhere else.

Definitely stuff to look forward to, but I’ve got a lot of the elements of my perfect day already. Nice.

When that happens, you know you better be checking your coolant.

That’s what it’s like for me and Google Alerts this week. My new friend Lori (an advertising smarty-pants) mentioned it to me, and then I read about it somewhere else, and then I read this article over at Duct Tape Marketing. In it, John Jantsch explains how to set up an alert to find out when someone links to your blog.

And what use is that? Well, it’s cool for one thing. And sometimes WordPress doesn’t detect it correctly, but the all-knowing Google will. And Lori informed me that it’s a great way to get to know the people who are writing about you. That, and the fact that I’ve heard about it three times in the past three days lets me know that I better go sign up right about now.

All I can tell you is how we answer the question. In other words, I’m going to list real prices that WE actually charge our clients, at the risk of giving off the impression that I’m trying to sell you something. I’m not. These numbers are purely to inform you of what the market looks like for a small, young (as in…we’ve only been open since February 2008), independent studio such as ours.

For your additional info, we are based out of a private residence, and we are not located in a high-priced locale such as New York or San Francisco (we’re in Virginia Beach, which is not “up there” as far as cost of living goes, but it’s not “down there” either.) These factors affect our prices.

With that warning in place, here are some benchmarks to consider when trying to figure out how far your budget will take you:

1. The smallest of the small budgets ($300+): If your budget’s pretty tiny, you can still have a nice website. There are hundreds of excellent WordPress themes out there (and no, your website does not have to be a “blog” for it to be powered by WordPress…that’s a misconception.) You can usually get a website like this customized for you for as little as $300, not including hosting and a domain name ($100+ per year.)

   Granted, you will have limitations, and you will have to add all of the content yourself, but the Content Management System (i.e. WordPress) that you use should make that relatively simple. That’s an additional bonus to using a CMS, in fact. Your maintenance costs will be lower because you can do the majority of it yourself. Template customizations are the Ramen noodles of the web design world. Tasty and cheap.

   (Note: Not ALL template customizations are simple. They can range in the thousands if the theme is complex or if you need additional modifications and functionality that the template does not provide. The Revolution theme comes to mind as an example of a theme that requires more complex customization.)

2. A small budget ($900+) (yeah I know…that still seems like a good chunk of change to most of us): Let me just be honest here. If you want a professionally-designed website on the cheap, go for a template customization. Even the smallest, simplest of websites require a LOT of time in every stage of development. Yes, even a website that is small (determined by number of pages) and simple (determined by level of functionality) is going to be much higher-priced than a template customization.

   So let’s just throw it out there — the simplest websites that we create start at $900. And no, this is not expensive in the web design world. It’s about on the same level as Chef Boyardee. Not quite Ramen noodles, but we’re close.

   And what does a small, simple website look like? Mainly a static website (one where the pages are always the same, no matter which way you click) that has a handful of pages and a contact form. Not huge, but it’s a start. And it can definitely be enough to get your name out there.

3. A small-medium budget ($2000+): With a little bit of a larger budget, you’re going to get more pages and more functionality. Your website might have a blog in place. It might have a newsletter. Our website fits in this category. If you were eating it for dinner, it’s more like the store-bought Rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans of web development.
4. A medium budget ($3500+): In addition to more pages and more functionality, here’s where you get to start adding things like shopping carts and integrated payment systems into your repertoire. It’s not going to get you anything like Amazon, but you can definitely cover your basic shopping cart needs if this is your budget. Kind of like your Sunday dinner of websites.
5. A medium-large budget ($5000+): Here’s where you can start getting a little dynamic. Instead of having a static (non-interactive) website, you can start to add some user functionality. Maybe you want to offer an online help desk to your clients. Maybe you want them to be able to search for your products in a slew of different ways. Maybe you want your visitors to be able to create a simple profile that they can update themselves. Now we’re getting to the Thanksgiving dinner of web design.
6. A large budget ($8,000+): If you want to start your own social networking site or site that has a lot of different things that the user can do, you could do it with a budget this size. Granted, on the lower end of this scale, you’re going to have much less functionality than the higher end (and believe me folks, some websites take half a million or more to produce…these are usually developed by large studios or are done in-house). So here we have the filet mignon of website development.

Now if you go with a larger, more established studio or a highly talented, established freelancer, you can pretty much double or triple those base prices. If you go with a less experienced freelancer, or a designer who uses HTML-authoring software to produce horribly mangled code (sorry…couldn’t help but throw that in there!), you can cut those base prices in half or even thirds.

So you see, that’s why developers generally avoid the “How much do websites cost” question. Because it’s absolutely impossible to answer. And I probably shouldn’t have even attempted it, but I’m a glutton for punishment. I have to be because I’ll probably get lots of nasty emails from web designers who say I’m completely off the mark. Which is okay. You can’t compare apples to oranges, and you can’t compare one web developer to another based on price alone.

A better way of figuring out how much a web developer charges is actually not based on the quote they might give, but on their hourly rate. $75-$250 is the going range at the time of this publication. (Our rate is currently $90.) In the past several years, I have only seen one professional who charged less than $75 (and no, I don’t remember who it was.)

Another factor to consider is the level of service that a web developer offers. For example, for us, the cheapest template customization is probably going to consist of one or two consultations, via phone or email. There would be no more than one mock-up and one round of modifications. Once the template was implemented, it would be in the owner’s hands. We really are loving about the whole thing, but we can’t do more than that or it would cease being a cheap option.

A fully developed website is a whole different sack of potatoes (I’m not sure why I’m into the food analogies today. Perhaps because I just came back from the dentist, and it hurts to eat. Moving on.) That level of service would include several phone or face-to-face meetings, a full range of creative concepts discussed, a plan for the information architecture of the site, one or more fully developed mock-ups, several rounds of modifications, implementation of a test site, rigorous testing before the launch, etc. etc.

A wise sage (okay, my husband) once told me that there are three factors in any project: price, quality, and speed. You can only pick two. I think that about sums it up.

I used to be a huge fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, but it turned me into a machine. I was getting things done, alright. I just wasn’t really living. It’s an EXCELLENT tool, but it really worked a little too well for me.

Now, I use the “Notes” function in my mail program (Mac’s Mail app, if you’re wondering.) I jot down ideas as they occur to me and pretty much go with the flow. For the past week I’ve been keeping myself on track with David Seah’s Printable CEO. I like how concrete it is. I get to score myself based on the importance of the things I’ve been giving my time to.

I also use the “To Do” function in my mail program. I give myself three things that I need to do each day, and that’s it. I make sure that they are each important things that are moving me toward my goals. It allows me to accomplish much while giving myself a lot of freedom and flexibility with my day.

But if I were to come up with a “dream” productivity tool, I guess it would be something that automatically reminded me of things I needed to do. Something that didn’t require constant maintenance. Something that I wouldn’t really need to think about much. Actually, I think a personal assistant would do the trick quite nicely.