Design My Own Website

Archive for May, 2011

I’m an entry level freelancer and am trying to figure out some rough pricing.

I get this question a lot. Web Design contracting is not that difficult. The “hardest” part is getting clients.

As far as charging, it really depends on the type of website and how much maintenance.

Web Design As A Contract Job Can Be A Good Source Of Income

If you’re looking to do just local ma-and-pa type shops and professional services (like dentists) and throwing up a brochure type site with nothing too fancy, I would say you could charge $20 a month for everything. Some months they will want a lot of work, some months they won’t need any work.

So you might want to try just one or two and see how many hours you spend on maintenance and then from there adjust your pricing depending on how much time you find spending on maintenance.

However, if you use WordPress, much of the maintenance can be done by the client. WordPress content management is easy to use.

I would say that the initial build of the site you could easily charge $500 for, especially for small brochure sites for professional services type clients: a dentist, chiropracter, physical therapist, etc. You could do $500 for a professional service site (WordPress) and then $10 to $20 a month for maintenance.

Good luck and have fun!

It really depends on the purpose of your site and your timeline – if it’s not overly complex, you can do it yourself. Otherwise you will have to get a professional.

This is by far my favorite web design resource “Web Design Mastery” which I talk about often on my own blog.

The first part of Web Design Mastery, “Planning your website” , is exactly what you’re looking for as far as designing your site. It will also give you some good info if you end up going with a professional so you can speak the same language and know what kinds of questions to ask.

The rest of the resource is helpful if you will build your own site, it won’t be much help if you go with a professional in which case I’d leave it up to you if it’s worth $67 to buy it. I’m sure the info is out there for free or cheaper but I pretty much use “web design Mastery” for a lot so I don’t know what else would be out there. If your timeline is pretty liberal and you are on a budget, definitely keep looking.

As far as tips and tricks: Web Usability is very important and I think it is often not thought about enough.

I did write a quick article on a few common Dos and Donts (based off of “Web Design Mastery”) .. it’s on my blog but here’s the quick version of the Don’ts (and it might be common sense except for the last one)

Don’t:
poor load time
poor browser compatibility (i.e. too complicated)
slow loading graphics
too many graphics
too many animations
busy distracting backgrounds
poor use of frames
too much advertising
large welcome banners (even your own!)
overuse of java
overuse of any technology for that matter
confusing layout and usability ****

This last one is tricky because even if your site is nice and clean it can still be confusing. As an example, if you go to a bunch of membership sites where you need to register for an account, you’ll know what I mean – some of them have very very easy to find “Register” or “Sign up Now” buttons, others are very hard to find. Usually these should be in the upper right. Most “function” buttons (login, logout, register, etc..) are found in the upper right.. Put them somewhere else and users conditioned to see htem in the upper right will be confused. Also, why use “Sign Up” (two words) when “Register” works just as well and lets the user think less.

Another example of “confusing” or “not confusing” layout: shopping cart buttons. Thanks to Amazon and some of the early and big stores, people have been conditioned to see a shopping cart and know to click on it to go to their cart. So the words “Your Cart” or “Go To Your Cart” will be confusing. Even though the design is clean, it can be confusing.

Hope this is helpful!

You can definitely do it yourself and pretty cheaply. Credit card transations is a bit more on the complicated side, PayPal is much easier, at least in the beginning.

1) Get a domain . I recommend godaddy.com

http://godaddy.com

2) Get a hosting account. I can recommend hostmonster:

http://designmyownwebsite.net/go/hostmonster.html

I’ve used a handful of webhosting companies and to be honest their support was the first that seemed to really be on top of things. Whichever hosting company you choose, I say go to the live chat at odd hours and ask presales questions and see what you think of the company. That is why I would pick hostmonster (even over the very popular hostgator)

Paypal makes it very easy to take credit card transactions online

3) Get a paypal account. You will see a “Merchant Services” tab and you can generate your own link and button and PayPal will give you the HTML to use

http://paypal.com

4) If you know HTML, you can design it on your own. Otherwise you can use WordPress to get yourself going quickly (and then use html and graphics skills to really spice up the site). WordPress is limiting if you want a lot of interaction with the user but it’s good for general layout ideas.

http://wordpress.com

There are actually some great HTML resources out there too. My personal favorite is Web Design Mastery because when I first bought it I was expecting to open up the book and learn HTML right away and instead the entire first book had NO HTML in it – all she talked about was what makes effective web design for marketing and usability – that was new to me and I really liked that approach

Good luck!