Charges to build a website?
 

Hi Guys,

I've been asked to build a website for a local estate agents and roughly have and idea of what they are looking for.

As it stands they want some functionality built into it so they can list properties they are currently advertising, with the usual search functions for visitors, pretty standard estate agency website really.

As I have never really done a website and charged for it (only for personal use or friends), what would the going rate be? I'll do the design but a friend of mine who does development will do the search side and listing side of the site.

Any ideas? Just a ballpark figure please :D

Cheers!

J

Oh, probably looking at using php or possibly Coldfusion (CF is easier but more expensive to host....) depending on the budget from the client.

i charged a 'friend' £800 for their website. They supply Pet stuff to shops and needed a regular static website to advertise their products aswell as a dynamic online ordering system for suppliers.

I'd never done one before for money so just suggested a price and he was happy. In reality a web design company would charge a lot more afaik....

Cheers for the reply Chump.

Yeah I did one a few years ago for a neighbours business, charged £500 and they were happy with that, but then for some reason they pay £200 a year for hosting a site thats no more than 10mb!!! They have asked me to do some more work for them in the near future so I'll sort them out ;)

I have seen a few 'studios' locally that seem to just design in flash (not very well I must add) and there price list is just rediculous, over £3000 for a 10 page site and a few other bits, its horrifyfying to think people will pay that!

I would supply the web addy but I don't want to get into trouble :nono:

I'm meeting with them tomorrow to kick out some ideas, I think a figure in the region of £5-1000 is quite reasonable to be honest.

Cheers,
James

I'd use php, CF is harder and more expensive to host cos it's less common.
I've used both and now only use php.

All the 'I'd do it for peanuts...' people are mad, you just know there will be site visits, support calls, hassle, endless changes so make sure it is worth doing... We've done two sites recently that we are just waiting for the damn customer to agree PDFs before going live and it's dragging on...

You scoff about the 3k for 10 pages but there is a big difference between a site done by a mate and one done by a good designer who is creative in the work he produces.

An estate agent site could be a real can of worms, many round here use rightmove.co.uk or something similar.

I am a programmer and work with a designer and I wouldn't bother looking at that site for less than 3k, more like 4 or 5!

Are you saying do it for £1000 in total to include your developer mate?
If so, I would say you are too cheap!

Just my 2ps worth.

Good luck!

doing one for an estate agent myself at the moment for about 3k.

in my experience (6 years web dev) people that pay peanuts expect the earth and are a lot more work than those that understand that it is a business.

They would not think twice about spending 5k on a facelift for their shop - their website is much more important and should be treated as "proper" advertising.

Dont sell yourself short by doing it cheap - expect the time involvement to double when the lists of I want it to do that and i thought you said it would do this settle down. The end spec is NEVER what is first discussed.

hth

Okay my 2cents for what its worth!

Get a copy of something like Mambo - http://www.mamboserver.com/

Its a content management system which allows you to create a website which can be easily managed, pages added, changed, deleted. Its simple to use and there are many hosts who support Mambo. It cuts out the need to learn a language. For an example of a site using it then have a look here - http://www.baby-benz.com/portal/

Cost to you, £50 tops plus the time taken to set it up and change the template!

But I also agree with RichB - You get what you pay for!

Mike

Thanks for the replys guys, it's helped me quite a bit!

Spoken to my development guy and although I haven't been given the specs for the site yet (meeting now on Friday) we both feel the £1000 I was considering for a complete site now not to be enough due to the fact the amount of development time it could take to get the site functioning exactly how they want. Looking at using php rather than CF now as the hosting costs are cheaper.

I have to bear in mind they are not one of these big estate agent chains, so budgets are likely not to be so high. But we are now considering, depending on what they want, looking in the region of £3k to make it worth our while as we expect requirements to change over time (hey, these places make a killing everytime they sell a place! :D ).

Thanks for your help guys, I'll let you know how it goes.

J

£3k is a serious website rate - got to be that figure - if they dont want to pay it ,move on as they would only be hassle otherwise expecting a £10k site for £1k.

I've never believed in charging ridiculous sun of money for lines of code and pretty pictures. :rolleyes: Fair do's if you make a living from it and are working for serious clients but what i've done for my mates i've done for peanuts. Although i do have the added benefit of having a fair bit of time on my hands so i am not really sacrificing anything to build the site.

That said i haven't really done anything semi-serious for over a year now, tend to spend more time looking after personal sites. Put it this way though, i built a client-managed database driven (PHP, MySQL) product catalogue site in exchange for an Apexi AVC-R. :D Unfortunately Jamie decided to put his venture on the back-burner and H1 Performance has been dormant for quite some time now. :( I did this very basic one-page site for the cost of a hotel room and all the cost-price Octane Booster i can drink. :)

Why be greedy? Spread the love! :p

Charge them what you think they can afford :)

Just noticed this and its a subject close to my wallet :p

if they want a cheap site i look at using http://open-realty.org/ a free web based listing management app specifically aimed at estate agency.
Get some nice graphics made and just configure it to what they need.

If its unique code specific to them i would go with the posts above.

I was just about to post that there must be something out there already that you can tweak. No point reinventing the wheel - every estate agent needs a similar system.

Thanks Scoobylover, that looks like a useful program we could probably look at.

Downloaded the code, sure we can adapt it to suit our needs, would certainly cut some of the work out.

James

Just to add,

Building, hosting, developing etc is all well & good but folks need to find the site.

Will they pay for SEO & promo etc?

If you build it (right) they will come....

why not charge them £800 for the site,
and if they want £10 per month for unlimited updates

Hopefully the site will be built in such a way where they will not have to pay for updates. They can update it themselves.

It depends how much work needs to go into it. A website that allows properties to be uploaded wouldn't take very long at all, but i'm sure there are other requirments which aren't quite as straight forward. Try and get some sort of up front payment. It's very easy for them to mess you around. You can work on the website for 2 weeks solid, testing, etc and then they realise they can't afford it.

Ohh and i would also put a spec together for them, have a meeting get them to read through it. In your terms make sure you write that once a final spec has been presented and signed there will be no changes or modifications made until after the website is complete. These changes will then be charged at our normal hourly rate.

Even down to design and colours, i've lost count how many times you get half way through something and the customer suddenly changes their logo, or would like different colours, etc.

Good luck, and if anyone has an idea of how i go about picking up work for myself let me know i never know where to look!