Anyone charging more than this for a website?

Yeah, our minimum is $4k for a basic Wordpress site. I'd rather only sell 2 sites a week at $4k and know I'm dealing with clients who have a high enough budget to be successful than scrape the bottom and have to sell 2 or 3 times that many and deal with the nightmares that come with low budget clients.

Yes, they are.

If you perceive a web site as the solution to a $10,000 problem, you'd be willing to pay a few hundreds. If you perceive a website to be the solution to a $1,000,000 problem, you're willing to pay a few thousands to fix it.

If you're a web designer and want to charge more (assuming you have the skills, of course), find people who think they have $1,000,000 problem and stay away from people with $10,000 problems.

Yes. In fact many will pay $10,000+ without blinking an eye.

Keep in mind at the higher price levels your clients will be more
image conscious so your sites have to look fantastic.


The exception to that is smart clients willing to pay for a site
that brings in results who have some understanding of direct
response.

For them they just want the site to work as a lead generation
and conversion tool and if their business is big enough with a
client like that you can be talking tens of thousands of dollars
in fees to create a site and generate traffic to the site.

The price is not so important as the return on investment for
savvy business owners.

They're happy to pay $20,000 to get back $40,000+ in profits.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

Gouging? I commend people have the posture to do good work, charge high fees and get it.

Too many webmasters make the mistake of charging what they perceive as "fair market value" for their time and material costs to produce a look and feel, but not for their knowledge of the web. That's why most of them are either just scraping by, or working full time for someone else and just doing design on the side instead of doing it full time for themselves.

There's more to web design than look and feel - a company's web presence should be the core of their consumer engagement strategy. Choosing the right look and design elements are secondary to developing the right purpose for the site - identifying why someone would go there, what a new or repeat customer reasonably expects to get out of their visit, proper navigation constructs, etc.

If all you're doing is saying "Ok, for $X you get a home page and 5 sub pages, so what do you want on them?" then all you'll ever get are the bottom of the barrel customers who know they "want a website" but don't know what they should be doing with it. But if you're taking the role of the "digital strategist" as part of the package, and work with them to plan a comprehensive web strategy for their business, you're bringing real value to your clients.

Even if a $45 template from Themeforest meets their every need design-wise, it can still be a $4,000 - $8,000 price tag depending on what other expertise you bring to the table. Design itself is "cheap grunt work" - any kid in high school can do that. But knowing what design elements to use to best-present their business to their clientele is valuable knowledge that most webmasters simply aren't charging for. And they should be.

Not necessarily... it depends how much research goes into it as well.

Here's a real life example. We met with a client a couple of weeks ago that's a major automotive wheel manufacturer. They have about 30 different wheel styles and were looking to refine their image and start positioning themselves as a more high-end brand, going after higher net worth customers.

When you visit a "big brand" website, there's a certain feel you get from it - look at pg.com for example. Every image, every word, every option on that site was carefully selected/crafted, vetted, because a properly done brand site needs to convey a feeling - not just "look good". Every type of audience will have different psychological triggers, and if you're reaching a high net worth audience there's an expectation there as well - for some products you aren't actually selling the product, you're selling the lifestyle. Building a luxury brand isn't about the product, it's about selling the image of who the consumer wants to be.

Look at prescription drug commercials... the ruggedly good-looking man in his 50's with a girl half his age, the young couple running along the beach with their dog, a bunch of teenage girls pillow fighting in their pajamas... what do these have to do with the drug? Nothing. The pharmaceutical companies are selling a lifestyle. It's a psychological trigger that makes people remember the brand, because they see an image they identify with and subconsciously think they either are, or can be, that person. Now apply the same thing to the web.

The site I'm referring to for the wheel manufacturer is an $85,000 project for the client - to be fair, about $50k of that will be spent directly on video production, but that still leaves $35,000 strictly for the web development costs because there is a ton of strategy and R&D behind it.

When it's all said and done, a good web designer will look at it and say "I could have built this site in Wordpress in an afternoon" - and they're right, they could have - if the client gave them an exact scope of work, wireframe, navigation, furnished the images and video to be used, and basically told them exactly what to do. The design process itself is the easy part.

But figuring out what to do, doing the proper research and due diligence, and getting inside their customers heads to meet expectations... that's what my clients are paying for. Way too often designers only bill themselves for their "work output" and not their strategy - maybe that's because they aren't doing it and just build sites to the clients spec, and if so that's fine. But your time is worth something too, and if I have a group of consumer engagement experts developing strategies I'm billing for their time too, not just the time it takes the web designer to code it out once the decisions have been made.

I got the impression when you said "there should be a difference between a $299 site and a $3,500 one" that you were speaking in terms of how the site looks - if I read that wrong I apologize, my point was that sometimes a $3,500 (or $35,000) site can look no different than a $299 site. It all depends on what's going on behind the scenes.

This is the main reason why we don't do graphical mockups until after we have a deposit and commitment (it's one of the last phases actually - content curation happens first). Early on, too many times we would go through the normal process (which does take a lot of time), kick around a couple of mockups, and then the customer shows them to some kid and says "They're charging you how much?? I will make you a site that looks exactly like that for $500, send me that graphic".

There are mortgage brokers that rent sites at $65 a month. These are sites template sites that have everything a mortgage broker can possibly need and some content on every page + some articles.

The mortgage broker picks the pages he wants, removes the other. Some change the content on the home page and maybe a couple other pages. Some just add in their name and contact info.

They're new, are afraid to make large purchases.

Then there are mortgage brokers who buy $1,000... because they think they need a few pages and a basic contact form.

Or because they are in parts of the country where the average loan is $80,000. (Mortgage brokers get paid a percentage of the loan amount, usually between 1%-3%.

Then there are the ones who spend several thousand dollars on a site that's specific to them, has several application forms that get automatically converted to their Point software and can handle security (i.e., prospects can safely leave their social security number).

Though the do occasionally $100k loans, their main loans are $250k and up. I know one whose average a couple of months ago was $325k. 2% of $325k makes him think he needs to have a better office than he did when he was dealing with $150k-200; (more expensive furniture, a more polished receptionist, and a more sophisticated, better-looking website, logo, letterhead, cards.

If you go for mortgage brokers who're located in areas where the average home is $100k and who're local, odds are good that they will be willing to pay less for a site than their counterpart (who has the exact same number of loans a month) who's doing his business in a $350k average home price area.

And, if you're dealing with a mortgage broker who is the whole company and only does 2 loans a month that get him $2,500 (even though the cost of living where he is will be lower), odds are good he'll pay less than both.

Yeah, it happens. There are limits on prices you can charge, limits the market places on things.

At some point, if you want more money per item, you need to improve the product you're selling or sell another product.

The real reality of web design is that if you're only using wordpress, you aren't really a web designer lol.

Umm... Who said anything about coding in notepad? The truth is that web design is a trade and every real web designer has a toolbox. Not every tool is an all in one solution, and most certainly wordpress is not right for every website. You have multiple CMS's, and for someone who is the self proclaimed ecommerce expert, you should already understand that wordpress is inferior for ecommerce projects.

If you don't understand that there are major CMS's out there, other than wordpress, then you're a joke. Do you think wordpress is better for ecommerce than magento? Do you think it is better for enterprise websites than Drupal? Do you think it is better for membership sites than Joomla?

If you only use wordpress, you are not a web designer....

Anyway, congrats on creating a new screen name so no one knows who you are. I'm sure it is only a matter of time until you get busted out for your lies once again.

Doesn't web design pertain to.... web design? Web design is web design whether it is a small dry cleaner business or a global ecommerce business.

Anyway, thank you for verifying what I said... Calling me out on my "B.S" then agreeing with my statement... LOL.

Wow... you really can't respond with facts at all, can you? Web design is web design, whether it is a small business or large. Web development, is web development whether the company is small or large. What is your point? Web design is basically the front end, and web development is the back end. Perhaps you don't understand what either one is.

Obviously you have a lot of anger towards me, because to lash out like this over me saying something so basic and true that I said, is just crazy. I'm sorry that I must have offended you so much, before you even registered here last month, that it has come to you taking shots at me simply for me stating the fact that web design is much more than wordpress installations lol.

Anyway, whatever... have fun pushing the idea of your $4,000 basic websites while selling your WSO's for next to nothing.

Good luck when you decide to step into reality.

P.S. you're the one looking like the troll, arguing with people that have even agreed with you.

$5K-$7500 is by no means "high end". And I don't say that because I'm some "guru" selling $50K websites.

I say it, because I started out selling $750 websites. Then I started selling $1500 websites. Now I'm selling $5K websites, give or take, when appropriate. The difference? Sure, I'm much better than I was in the beginning, but THAT'S NOT THE DIFFERENCE. The difference is that I ASK FOR IT, and am comfortable doing so.

Trust me I love brainstorming ideas. But until it's tested it doesn't mean anything really and this idea is one that I have heard before, the typical "monthly website" idea.

There are two things people assume when they think this idea will work.

1) It takes less time to sell a website that is just a monthly fee then to sell a real website/web services solution at say $3,500.

This is not true. It doesn't take any more time. You still have to sell, you still have to sell when you give things away for free haha honestly you do.

2) Going along with the previous...that it will take a short amount of time to make 1000 sales.

This is also wrong, it will take a long time, a very long time. And finally after you have spent all that money and time making sales, years and years, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission because no sales rep is going to work for 30% of 29.99 per month or 49.99 per month....only after all that will you have your $350,000+ annual revenue...and then you have to continue to replenish the 10% a year that leave you.

Instead of taking years and years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to sell 1000 clients why not sell 103 clients in a year on a $3,500 web services solution, which is just 2 a week....1 sales rep could do that....his name is YOU by the way so you don't need anyone else.

At the end of that year you made $360,500 in revenue, and if you can get 20% to do SEO with you at $1,200 per month that's another $288,000 in yearly revenue.


I just don't think the monthly website idea is a truly viable business compared to that.