TWD-Tony said:
It's no good being the best designer in the world and charging £2000+ per website - nobody would dream of using you (unless you are a Beckham!).
Umm we seem to be doing okay (well the design side of the company is), at a fair bit greater than that ballpark.
Although everything is costed to requirements I guess small scale is between 2K and 5K, mid-range is 5K - 15K and our larger solutions have been known to go 60K+.
But then you pay for what you get. Almost everything that comes out of here has a high degree of programming behind it to match and improve business process and browsing experience, the (x)HMTL code should invariably be full standards compliant and accessible, the rights on the images used are fully secured and legit, clients are taken through every step of the process with dedicated PM and the designs (IMHO), more often than not are stunning (although there is no accounting for taste).
At the end of the day whatever is charged for comes down to day rate, or hour rate and well £350 doesn't buy a lot of that for any established company. It will either get templated design (i.e. you look good'ish - but there are lots of companies that look similar), or a very small amount of time.
Say a freelancer wants to take home £500 a week, tax, insurances, rental, utilities, telephone, accountants fees, paper etc. probably put that up by another £150-200. So were now up at £700 (conveniently 2*£350
).
So, £700 translates to £2.5 days on a 5 day week. But it isn't what you're getting. There is the time taken for admin, marketing and all those annoying bits and pieces that crop up, so if we throw a day a week at that which isn't unreasonable we're now 4 days, of which you might get 2 days.
Of the two days available from our freelancer there is the back and forward time to move the project on. Design concept, Imagery, mock-up, interactive mock-up in HTML, Content, SEO, etc. which really are needed to get a good looking site that works.
So, to get this all done there is going to be communication backwards and forward, content collected, designs agreed, etc. From experience these things normally take time, clients like to go away and have a brief think, find out what they really want to be saying on their about us page, or what will be their meta data etc. So we can throw a turn around time of two days out of the window. This means to make the £500, the freelancer needs to be working on more than just their 2 projects a week. With a two week turn around with client information to make his money he needs to be doing 6 concurrent projects, 2 finishing, 2 to finish next week and 2 to complete the week after that. So there goes more of the clients time.
At the end of the process I would say that the £350 buys less than a day of the freelancers time. No if all you're after is a few pages on the web saying your there, maybe a day is all your website needs (and you might want to take yell up on their offers and do it yourself). However if you were hoping to get something that was going to be slightly more than an online calling card, that you'd hope to get business through, is a day enough?
Sorry for length...
