So I'm in a bit of a sticky situation. I'm a teen, and I recently did the website and email system for my moms medical office. I don't maintain any of the physical machines, its running on BlueHost, but I maintain all the stuff on the hosting. I set up the email, and keep the WordPress site up to date. Now that I've got it done, I am trying to figure out a good price to charge for this, as they want me to provide them a quote. They're nice people so I don't want to overcharge, but I have had to fight with this a bit so I don't want to cheat myself out of money either...
The site can be found at http://happiinc.com
Don't judge the name, that wasn't my decision, I know its cheesy but no one asked me :P
I did the site design, wrote the pages, I SEOed it, and I set up their email. I set up RainLoop as their email client and also set up the ability to change their password from within the client.
How much would you charge for this? I've never done this professionally before so I have no idea...all I know is my site beats the heck out of the site that they'd gotten set up by YellowBook, which was basically an HTML business card...
This is your first paid gig doing a website - and it looks great. But if there is one thing i have learned painfully over the years is - If you are good at something never do it for free. That said you still need to establish yourself and your brand. I would say maybe shoot for $10-15 per hour and take a guess at your total time. Also creation/set-up and maintaining are 2 different things, and if they want you to continue to keep the site updated and functioning you can either offer them a contract with a set monthly fee for a set amount of hours of work, or just charge hourly for every "visit."
It can be hard to feel like any amount is "justified" when you are working for close friends or family - but never undersell yourself. I would also ask the business owner or the head doctor to write you an official letter of referral on Company Letterhead, and attach that to your resume and your portfolio. If you don't already have a portfolio start making one. Get business cards made and get the business to allow you to put them out for some easy advertising. These are all the ideas i have for you. Good luck and keep up the good work man. Site does look really good.
Cool, thanks for the kind kind words everyone! Its not shown on there, but I also set up and maintain their email, which they use a lot, plus I set up OwnCloud which they use occasionally. The email was actually a massive pain because I had to pester Bluehost to give me the info I needed about cpanel to tell RainLoop Webmail the credentials to change mail users passwords from inside the client. The flip side is now everyone can change their password directly from the mail client.
Thanks again for all the kind words, I did have to fight with the theme quite a bit (colors, fonts, etc) and I actually had to take a terribly low res logo and make a new logo just keeping the smiley face (don't know if that adds any $$$)
I'll let you guys know how it works out, I may eventually end up doing all their IT stuff because their current IT guy is taking advantage of them, he won't even come out and help them set a static IP for their network printer...I'm just keeping quiet because give a fool enough rope and he'll hang himself
I'm glad y'all liked the site, let me know if you want to know any of the themes/plugins I used, I am proud to say I actually didn't spend a DIME on themes or paid plugins, all of it is freely available software I dug up.
A few hundred $$$ plus ongoing maintenance fees ~ for site updates etc seems very fair to me. Have a look in your local area for what the going rates are perhaps.
Fingers crossed their current IT gets the boot soon so you can be their go to guy.
I've been through a similar situation so thought I'd share it here.
My Dad is the director of a liquidation company. They had a design for one website done but needed the design to be integrated in a CMS and another website that needed design and CMS integration. As he's family I didn't want to charge the prices I usually charge and had to think a lot about what the invoice should be.
Just for comparison, the digital agency I work for charge minimum $2000 for a design and website. $5000 if Magento based. In the end I decided $250 for the first website and $500 for the second one, which both use Wordpress. The reasons I charged such a low price was because:
They are not fussy about anything, they literally just told me what they needed and left me to do it how I see fit (best client).
Money wise, over the years my Dad has definitely spent a lot of money on me so I wanted to do this for him.
Both were done in one week in my own spare time, so it was a quick job.
After giving them my invoice I heard back from my Dad a week later asking me to redo my invoice. Apparently, one of the other directors thought I wasn't charging enough (which my Dad said was weird of him as that director is usually pretty stingy with money) and said to add on a $1000. The next day I emailed them an invoice for $1750.
The comparison once again is $1750 vs $4000. Even though you should never undervalue yourself when charging for your services family can be an exception.
Thanks! I'm glad you liked it, I must say I'm impressed at how awesome WordPress was, I went into this knowing very little, I had set up a proof of concept on a Linux machine I had at home, but other than that I was an idiot :P
Yeah, fingers crossed about their IT guy :P its going to happen, the question is when lol he doesn't even bother to set static IPs on their printers, and rather than ask me for the password on the PC I set up for them (because he couldn't get out there that day) he just reinstalls Windows and then blames me for their web apps that depend on Java not working. Like REALLY grow up and admit you messed up, don't blame me for doing exactly what I was supposed to. Lol anyway now that I've ranted, thanks again everyone! I'm preparing my invoice this week, I'm settled on somewhere between $300 and $500 based on what rates are here. We'll see how it goes!