Personally, I estimate the time involved and multiply it by my labor rate, and add on any expenses.
There must be some way for site mx folks to charge for really busy ones vs static ones. Much more labor for the former.
Maybe, maybe not. Most of the cost at the building stage is usually the time to create the initial design, unless you use canned templates / themes or the design is very simple.
As for ongoing optimization, that costs, too, but the pricing is widely variable. I have one client who pays me $1300.00 a month to keep his site on the first page of Google for all relevant searches. (He's usually in slot 1 or 2.) The way I do that is pretty simple: I designed the site using all the proper code, tags and such, wrote good content, and make updates to it every day. (Search engines value freshness of content.)
Is it a flat rate plus per hour?
That's up to the designer, but it usually boils down to that eventually, no matter how it's wrapped.
What are some typical rates?
I usually base my estimates on $115.00/hr total time for the life of the agreement (usually a year at a time). That includes the initial development of a new site, as well as my estimate of how many things I'll have to do to try to keep it placing well. I also add a portion of the routine maintenance of the server, leasing fees, and so forth, as well as any other expenses (licenses and so forth).
Renewals are priced similarly, except that some clients get "special" rates based on how much they aggravated me over the past year. These can work to increase or decrease their costs.
Significant discounts are available for patient people who are in no hurry. But the work will have a lower priority than full-priced work. I've also done a few sites as
mitzvahs for worthy groups that were really, really broke, back when I could afford to work for free.... sigh...
How about for a small, museum in the country website (ie not the Smithsonian), you can imagine not much traffic but the owners will want the site mgr to be available to move stuff around and install videos periodically.
Like I said previously, a lot of the initial time is spent doing the initial design, which is the most time-consuming part of the process (for me, at least). So for a small site where the owner's not especially concerned about coming in Number 1 on searches, the biggest factor would be the complexity of the design.
Ongoing updates are priced at the hourly rate unless they're so trivial time-wise that it's not worth invoicing it.
What questions can I answer to help you with my question?
Links to a few Web sites that are something like what you have in mind, how many pages you think you'll need, whether you plan to write the content or want the designer to do it, how many photos you want and whether you have them in digital form...
Is it possible to self-administer a website?
Yes. But you still need a host. Depending on your HTML skills, you probably will also need some sort of CMS framework. I haven't had very good luck with most of them optimization-wise, so I prefer to hand code.
What would it cost for the site alone if you do that?
Again, depends on what you want. If all you want is the framework installed, the initial theme designed, and you take it from there, then it would be based on the complexity of the initial theme and the difficulty of installing the framework or CMS. (Most are quite easy.)
-Rich
