How do you handle building Websites for your clients?

Be sure to offer upsell services, like specialized plugins, SEO, backlinking, etc. Restaurants live and die by their upsells and so should you.

Wow... well, you have to understand web design, or this will hurt you in the long run. You need to realize wordpress is not an ideal solution for the majority of clients. If you don't realize that, then they'll move onto someone else, pretty quickly. I get a majority of my clients from an old wordpress site that they don't like because it is too basic and not fully functional as a website. Wordpress is meant to be used as a blog. You can develop full websites with it, sure, but the quality isn't there.

I suggest you learn joomla, drupal, and magento as well. I wouldn't pay $100 for a wordpress site. I wouldn't go for under $500-600 though. Just because I wouldn't pay for that, doesn't mean you don't have clients that can. You could do good.... but you really need to expand if this is what you want to do. Wordpress will only get you so far, and those sites will be the cheapies.

I've wondered this also. I'm going to be designing a site for a graphic design client of mine, do I choose his hosting and everything, make site, and then just pass the details over? Is that how it works? Thanks

I do WP sites just like you outlined for about $300. I signed up for a hosting affiliate account and point the clients there for hosting and domain name. That way I still get some money but don't have to worry about support.

I also agree on the upsells. I have one client who now pays me $250 a month for SEO services, plus $250 a year just to help them for a hour per quarter on updates. You can also charge them to setup Google places, analytics, webmaster tools, alerts, etc. as I find most folks don't know anything about those.

I actually find most of my small biz clients like WP because it is easy to update.

You can always try to charge per hour. That way you avoid not getting paid for extra requests.

Regardless, the main thing is to draw a line and clearly state what the project is about, what is included, how much will the client be charged for extra (outside the scope) changes and requests, how many revisions are included (although,in your case this may not be needed as you are going to modify a template rather then create an original design) and so on. These are the details that determine if the project is going to end up a money (time) pit, or a profitable business.

Anyway, you get the point. Make sure the client understands this. You have to realize that even if you charge per project, it always boils down to how much you get paid per hour. Remember, if you charge $200 per project, it should not take you more than a few hours to complete, otherwise you end up earning equivalent of $5/hour.

As for finding clients, most come from referrals. You can also try some freelance sites and bid on jobs there, but I found that it is pretty much impossible to compete with the oversees designers who literally work for spare change, especially if they have no feedback yet. You can also try Craigslist, but be careful there, as they do not have any escrow system in place.

If you take a client on your own, always ask for a deposit (typically 1/3 - 1/2 of total fee). Otherwise you are risking that the client will simply lose interest mid-project, leaving you with no pay and wasted time. In my experience, no serious client ever rejected a request for deposit.

Also, when it comes to pricing, you can offer various scenarios. For example, Project B will include only the template modification for $X, Project B will include a template modification + SEO + 2 month free updates for $Y; Project C will include all of the above + logo for $Z etc. It's not so much upsale as it is an offer to meet customer's budget. This way you can pick up also low-budget customers yet make the same money (per hour-wise). Just make sure you can clearly explain benefits of each option.

Wordpress will actually work for most small businesses, that is if you are purchasing premium theme licenses of course. If you use free themes.. You will most definitely be replaced by someone else who will offer wayyy higher quality work.

If you feel like you can't find a nice theme, or if the client is asking for a little too complex, then just outsource it since it probably won't be expensive on your end. On the bright side you will now have more spare time to take care of other stuff.

I have built websites now for 3 years and all my sites are with Wordpress, and I now build mobile sites with WP also.

I use Artisteer to design my themes and to be honest would not build websites any other way. Using the All In One SEO plugin I usually get the sites indexed with Google within 7 days, sometimes within 24 hours. We all know Google lurves WP.

This site www.chilliesrestaurant.co.uk is actually built with WP and as you can see it can be unique.

As for pricing it depends on where you live, make a few enquiries on competition in your area.

Before investing in Artisteer or a Premiuim Theme that takes a "coder" to customize to uniqueness; check out these 3. (NO affiliate links here, I just like them and am considering for myself.)

iThemes Builder | iThemes

Headway Premium WordPress Theme


Catalyst | Premium WordPress Theme

Such an over-saturated market here. People are building WordPress sites for $40-$50. IM people are most often looking for bottom dollar work.

I offer quality WordPress and Joomla sites. I have no problem selling them for $549 up on the open market, but this is a "unique" market.

IMO, there is never any point in competing on price alone. There is ALWAYS someone cheaper. It's all about quality, service, functionality and unique designs.

I do what you have described for clients in my local area. I buy a client license for Thesis for each one so that I have consistency for maintaining their site and to make it easier for them to update if they prefer to do it themselves.

I would recommend charging by the hour, though, because inevitably they want added features as they think of them, and especially once they see the finished site. Mine end up in the range between $300-$500 usually for simple, mostly static, sites.

have more than a few clients.

Wow.... what a dialogue!
I just jumped on board today and what a gr8 library.

A lot of gr8 opinions here.
I started out building simple static sites 4 years ago.
I still enjoy playing with code. lol

Word of mouth has me now piggy backing a registration/hosting service with web development services.
I have only recently started thinking about actually looking at this as a real business.
My websites average $125 per page plus graphics and/or galleries.
Then again there are sites that are in the $225 per page range, plus, plus.
I always get a minimum deposit of 25% up front. Keeps you and the client motivated.

I have my hosting clients pay annually to reduce monthly accounting.
It makes for a bit of a touch up front for them but I break it into two payments, 30 days apart, for those that require it.
Whether they are monthly or other, make sure they understand that no payment for the domain renewal and/or hosting by the due date means automatic cancellation and then a re-activation fee on top of the dues.
Please don't make the mistake I made of auto renewing for them and then invoicing.
It's not worth the aggravation.

I have made many mistakes and wish I had first taken the time to create proper packages at the start.
Hosting is only cream, especially with the overwhelming onslaught of the big box stores jumping on board now... still as decent trickle of cream though.

I code in XHTML/CSS because I enjoy the puzzle. Throw in some jQuery and it sets the site apart from the others.

Okay.. there's my two words .. but realize this in only my opinion.

I have a handful of local clients and all are happy with what I worked out for them. I help them pick out a domain - we do that over the phone in about ten minutes - I use the free Google Adwords keyword tool and give them three suggestions based on local search volume - then they choose. I then show them over the phone how to go to GoDaddy and tell them to create their free account and to register and pay for their domain, and to change their nameservers to my nameservers at Hostgator. I get off the phone and let them and GoDaddy customer service take care of that together.

By the time they call me back I have already created their account in my reseller account and have slapped up wordpress. If I am lucky the nameservers will have already propogated, and the site is live. That impresses the heck out of them. I have a wordpress theme that I built myself that I use, so it is decent looking from the start. A link to my web design domain is in the footer, of course, plus in a sidebar widget, and I also give myself a page but do not have the page in the nav bar.

I have them email me images they want on the site and have them give me articles and information they want to use on the site and finish it up that evening or the next day.

I build the site for free but they must host with me for two years and prepay that. I offer a cheap maintenance plan for $10 a month where I do the WP upgrades - well I use the backup plugin, but things can still go wrong - so I also do a full cPanel backup once a month to cover my end of things. If a client doesn't want a paid monthly maintenance plan, they can buy my instruction manual ($20) for how to do the WP updates, and also screen shots of how to add a post and images. If they don't want that, I won't build them the site. Too many opportunities for a neglected site to go down for a long period of time, and then pretty soon they would be calling me wondering what happened. Be perfectly clear that the site needs monthly attention, to keep databases backed up and updates to new WP versions.

One client wanted me to travel to their home with the manual and walk them through it. I charged $100 for that home visit and the manual was included.

I also charge for Google Places - $25 to optimize their listing. Nobody has turned me down on that yet.

It is a small source of income for me right now, all local, by word of mouth. I am not really pushing it right now, as I am more interested in other income streams. But it has potential. Once a small business with no website understands they are going to need hosting and a registered domain, they have no problem with my pricing of $5 a month prepaid hosting in exchange for a free website.

I want them to own their domain as it is just so much easier and hassle-free should they decide to host elsewhere after the two years is up. They just change their own nameservers, I send them the full backup zip file and they go bother their new hosting company with the site install. Saves big headaches, trust me! They have my theme with my footer link, my sidebar link, and my page, too, and there is a good chance some of those links will remain. I don't charge anything for using my theme. I built it just for this purpose.

Local websites for small businesses need us - we are not going to rip them off. We care about them - we want our local businesses to stay in business.

Notice I make no promises about first page of Google or any kind of ranking. We all know it is easy to rank for local geo-targeted phrases, so be sure to get the city name in the domain if you can... they don't need a fancy SEO company to get a good ranking for local terms. They just need a live website with onsite SEO done right and a decent Google places listing.

No link building need be done by you at all. In my manual, I do include a few pages about link building and let them do it all themselves. Since these are brick and mortar entities, I mainly teach them how to contact professionals in related fields, perhaps people they have worked with, and get anchored links on those websites, through sidebar links or guest posting. For example, a carpenter might have been hired by a custom home builder. My client, the carpenter, can look at the custom home builder's web site to see if there is a natural place to put a link. The custom home builder's web site could easily have a sidebar area where the local contractors all routinely get a link. Better yet would be a post about each new home, including images, and nice long description of all the companies that helped make that house so beautiful, and the carpenter could easily get an additional link in that post.

Good luck with what you decide - and let us know how it goes!

I am a WP custom theme designer/developer and I only work with local small business. WP is a completely capable CMS. It will do anything you write the code to do. Even if you do not have that ability, there is someone out there who will work with you to get it done. With that ability, I do not sell WP sites for less than $2,000.

Of course, it does take much longer to develop a completely custom WP website than it does to put together pre-built themes.

I have far less clients than someone selling a $400 website, but the clients that I do have come back to me countless times for my upsells. Not only that, they refer new clients to me.

I only started working with WP a couple years ago. Before that, I built custom PHP sites in the $400 range. It was a disaster. I was not taken seriously because my customers did not see the $400 as an investment, it was simply a band aid to quickly say "We have a website" and nothing more. I was putting way too much work into something without a decent return. I never saw repeat business from these customers, mostly because they are no longer in business.

In the end, what you're selling needs to have value and a price to match.