How much should I charge for being a webmaster?

First. I would not build a website and absolutely would not act as a webmaster for Family or friends.

As for cost. What is your time worth? That is what you charge


al

Yeah, like Al says, clients and family are best kept apart. A family member is likely to call you at all hours to fix a problem, and generally expect things from you that most business clients would consider unreasonable.

Of course, we don't know how close you are to this person or what the family history is, but if you're intent on going ahead, a fixed fee for a specific service would be the way to go, rather than an hourly charge. It's hard to explain to someone non-technical how much time it takes to maintain a site.

Research as many webmasters as possible. Email them asking what they charge. Get an idea for a fair rate. Charge in that ballpark.

For photography, he could probably do everything himself at SmugMug:

https://www.smugmug.com/

Thanks for the help. The people I'm helping are not in the position to build their own website (my grandparents). I was going to build it with wordpress, but someone mentioned SmugMug and that seems much easier. I'll make the website, and I'll show them how to add their own images instead of them coming to me every day, because it seems easy with SmugMug. I have just always used Wordpress for my large commercial websites. As for pricing, I'll get in contact with webmasters to determine.

Sorry - I'll be the odd person here. I would not charge my Grandparents to build them a simple site.

The Charge may differ from site design to site design, Designer to designer. So it fully depends on you. You should think how gorgeous the site will be? If the function is many, you should charge a lot. Thanks for asking.

As almost everyone already said... it really comes down to how many hours you have to put in per day, per week, per month to keep your clients site up and running.

I personally wouldn't charge any family member any money for my work, except it's a long term project. In this case I wouldn't charge too much, but I also wouldn't disvalue my time.

It's really hard to say if you should charge $30 per hour, $200 per week or $500 per month, or anything like that.

If you can get new clients, outside of your family, I would ask myself the the following questions:

1.) How much time do I need to invest per day, week and month to keep your clients site updated?
2.) What costs do you have to cover to keep your business running every month?

Let's say your answers would be:

1.) I would need to invest approx. 2 hours per week to keep my clients site updated.
2.) I do have $50 per month in costs to cover.

Again... these numbers are just an example.

In total you would need to invest 8 hours a month to have your clients site updated. And you would need to have $50 in costs to cover every month.

Personally I would charge on an hour basis if your monthly workload is under 20 hours... for the sake of this example I would charge $30 - max. $40 per hour. In total you'd be making anywhere between $240 and $320 per month. For the monthly costs you would have to cover, I would divide the $50 by 8 hours which would end up in $6.25 per hour.

So in this example, if you'd like to charge $30 per hour, add the $6.25 too.
That'll be $36.25 - make it a round number - $37 per hour.

That's how I would do it.

Regarding the fixed price for any service you offer above 20 hours a month, I would do the math and ask myself the same kind of questions above.

Example:

Your clients wants you to work 40 hours on his project.
For any project below 20 hours you charge per hour $30.
Do the math: $30 x 40 hours = $1,200 per month.

In this case I wouldn't charge $1,200 per month, but $1,000 as a fixed price to make it more attractive for your clients too.


... this was supposed to be a short answer... LOL

I personally have a rule that I don't work with friends or family. But if you do, figure out what your time is worth and that's what you should charge