Charging for a New Website

[SlimJ]

Hi Guys,

I've been asked to build a website for a local estate agents and roughly have and idea of what they are looking for.

As it stands they want some functionality built into it so they can list properties they are currently advertising, with the usual search functions for visitors, pretty standard estate agency website really.

As I have never really done a website and charged for it (only for personal use or friends), what would the going rate be? I'll do the design but a friend of mine who does development will do the search side and listing side of the site.

The site is likely to be developed with php or Coldfusion (CF is easier for us but more expensive to host) depending on the clients budget.

Any ideas? Just a ballpark figure please

Cheers!

J

[JonRB]

SlimJ said:

As I have never really done a website and charged for it (only for personal use or friends), what would the going rate be?

This depends on how many personal use and friends' websites you've done. My feeling is (and forgive me if I'm wrong) that you're kind of starting out here, in which case if you charge professional / market rates they're going to expect a professional service.

Why not come to a deal whereby you do it for a nominal sum provided you can include the site on your portfolio and actively promote your services with it? You may even get referrals from them if you do a good job. They'll be far more lenient and forgiving if there are teething problems or it takes longer than you anticipated.

Otherwise, if you can do as good a job as this chap for the same price then charge that.

>> Edited by JonRB on Tuesday 7th February 20:02

[SlimJ]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for the comments and advice. Yes you are right as I am just starting out, but wouldn't say I'm inexperienced as such as I have worked in a web development enviroment for a number of years, its just I've not done a website for someone outside of friends and family as such.

To give you an idea, I knocked this design up in a few hours www.jamesmprince.f2s.com/australia/

Had a look at Venga Venga and can understand the low price that there able to charge (using osCommerce freebie), it would be handy if there was a similar product for the simple listing of properties!

I'm meeting with the client tomorrow so that should give a better understanding of things. I'm happy to do a 'mates rates' type of thing for the exposure it will get me hopefully and kickstart a few more possible jobs.

Thanks for your help.

James

[JonRB]

SlimJ said:

To give you an idea, I knocked this design up in a few hours www.jamesmprince.f2s.com/australia

Nice little site. I take it all back.

Do bear in mind that I had to make certain guesses and assumptions before I wrote what I wrote, so I apologise if I was wide of the mark.

[SlimJ]

No problem

[shocker-z]

yeah all advise above is good but got to remem,ber the searching needs to be acurate as everyone hates not being able to search.. if using PHP as you said it is cheaper and also is so diverse especialy with MySQL server, your should be able to create a nice litle backend for the estate agent too.. The best plus side to PHP is that help is very very widly avalible! www.phpfreaks.com great site with plenty of guru's and also www.php.net is about the best resource i found for PHP in past 2/3 years programming in PHP

Nice site above too

>> Edited by shocker-z on Wednesday 8th February 00:58

[SlidingSideways]

Is there not some opensource PHP package that will do 95% of what you're looking for? There are a few "e-commerce" type packages available. Then you just need to re-skin it and remove the bit's you don't need (shopping basket for example).
We very rarely write anything from scratch any more, 9 times out of 10 someone's already done most of what you want and it just needs customising.

As for pricing, when my friend started out doing this he simply estimated how many hours it was going to take and multiplied by an hourly rate.

It's also worth thinking about things like support after the website's gone live. You'll get phone calls about absolutely everything (whether it's your problem or not) and if you don't specify what support you'll provide for free and what you're going to charge them for, the money you make building it will get sorely eaten into by the ammount of time you spend making changes and bug fixes afterwards.
In a similar vein, also make sure you define the finished product. I've seen plenty of large companys fail to do this and projects drag on for months after they should've been signed off.

[_dobbo_]

JonRB said:

Otherwise, if you can do as good a job as this chap for the same price then charge that.

Bet that guy hooks in a lot of people with the £199 website deal. Then makes a killing with £25 per additional page (if the 2 pages included for £199 are not enough, which they almost certainly never are).

Nice bit of marketing there! Gives me an idea...


>> Edited by _dobbo_ on Wednesday 8th February 09:56

[slapmatt]

£1500

[davidd]

The last estate agents site we were involved with came in at about £400 (www.bradshaws4homes.co.uk)

Something to remember is that for a few quid estate agests can have access to a load of software which handles the creation of the property details, standard letter formats etc. It also shoves it all online so that all you the web developer has to do is link to it.

Good luck and if I can be any help please drop me an email.

Cheers

D

[SlimJ]

Thanks for the help guys,

Now meeting with the client on Friday to find out more info.

Posted the same question over on scoobynet too, just for some more opinions Having a few figures thrown around so its giving me a few ideas on what to charge for what I know they want.

Davidd, I understand the bit about estate agents having access to sites like rightmove, they currently use this but are interested in listing there own properties on there own site, am I right in thinking Rightmove and the others only list properties on there site and don't give out some sort of template so the properties can be listed on rightmove but appear on seamlessly on the estate agents site? That would be good.

Will post back once I've met with the client.

Cheers
James

[_dobbo_]

James, it would be worth your while investigating if sites such as rightmove allow you to embed a property listing from their site - al a Autotrader. If they do, this is a huge reduction in your time requirements, as you not only don't have to write the property display pages, you also don't have to write any input mechanism either.

Find this out prior to the meeting, as it seems to me you've got two distinct different specs otherwise - one is a simple site, few hundred quid and a walk in the park for you, the other is a much more complicated site with a database back end, input pages, upload pages, etc etc, and a lot more work.