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You need to charge what your work is worth. Not to you but to your client and that means that you need to give them a guarantee that they will be completely happy with the finished product you provide. The simple way to start is to set a fixed fee for the complete web site and to do this you will need some incremental prices. It is affordable web design and reasonable web design pricesthat an online cost estimate for web design will convince your web site visitors to choose your company.|Your prime objective here is to charge what your work is worth. The cost of your work must be acceptable to your customer and they must be happy to pay your fees. One way to insure their satisfaction is to offer a money back guarantee. The determination of fees is a subjective process but if you plan on providing the client a fixed fee for the complete web site you will need to break down your charges for each step in the design process.

Here are some of the items to price for your Price Schedule:

Standard Page We suggest you start by taking your day job salary rate per hour and use it for your base rate per hour. Now set the time you start on a ten page web site and then design that site. Do this with five different web sites and then take the total number of hours you have spent divided by five, times your hourly salary rate and you have a starting place for a price per page for a 'Standard Page' your design fees. Interactive Web Page For your interactive pages depending on the type of form you use you may charge 1.5 to 3 times what you charge for a Standard Page.

Web Forum The setup fee for a phpBB should be about three times what you are charging for your Standard Page. This is dependant on your client's ability to administer the Forum and assumes they will be doing the complete administration of the board.

Shopping Cart (PayPal) Setup (with 30 items). We suggest you pick one shopping cart to become very familiar with and use it almost exclusively. If the client requires a specific cart then charge by the hour to setup their cart. A reliable and easy to use cart is available form PayPal.

Shopping Cart (PayPal) Items (rate per item above the first 30). If you are using a PayPal cart, $5.00 per item is a reasonable price for additional shopping cart items.

Web Site Maintenance fees. A very difficult rate to set for a beginning firm because of the possible time that may be required for the site. Most web sites require very little maintenance while certain types require many hours a week.

The next step after you have established you prices is to decide how to present them on your web site. You want a simple but clearly described price schedule and you may want to give three or four levels of web site prices. I like to see an example of the cost estimate a vender will provide for a Request for a Proposal (RFP).