Yep. I should be charging more.
Chris Pearson has a great post here, about how much he charges for a blog design, and how much his competitors cost. He starts at $1500, but some of his competitors don’t even start until the $2,500 range. Now, I’ve tried to make some site designs recently for far less than that; and the problems I ran into were:
The client never really fully appreciates that you are giving them a “deal,” and therefore still wants all the bells and whistles that they would expect if you charged them “full price”.
Because their budget was low, I tried to “scale back” the design to a reasonable amount; but, what’s reasonable? That’s totally subjective, and what ended up happening was when they weren’t happy with the original idea I threw out there, I ended up spending 4 times as long as I’d budgeted to make them happy; they still weren’t. Once again, by trying to give someone a deal, I think I set myself up to make the client not be happy, by trying to give that client a special deal. No matter how little a client pays, there’s still going to want what you’d give them if you charged them a lot of money.
I really can’t stand the idea of just using some generic template–it feels like a disservice, since most of them seem really ugly to me, and have no personality. They can go somewhere else for that. But once you’ve opened up the door to design, you’ve opened up the door to someone’s subjective view of what something should look like, and you’d better budget for the time to make it that way. You can have simpler or more complex designs, you’d better budget some time for it either way.
Chris Pearson points out that all of his clients have a compelling reason to want a custom-designed blog:
My clients all have one thing in common. They have a concrete, business-based reason for hiring me to design them a killer site. Thus far, there have been no exceptions to this rule. All of my clients are doing one of the following:
- Using their site to sell a product
- Building a subscription list for marketing purposes
- Building links and increasing exposure to help with ad/referral conversion
One of the mistakes I have made, is trying to bring my prices down to the point where people who don’t have a clear business case for using my services, could afford me. What a mistake! These people–bless their hearts!–may still call me with a thousand questions, and ten thousand little tweaks and modifications, before they consider the project done.
As John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing has said, you’ll always find someone who’s willing to go out of business faster than you are, so there’s no sense competing on price. My repeated experience–much to my surprise, at times–is that there’s absolutely no sense in providing a professional product at a substandard price. Moreover, your clients are going to see you as substandard, not as a good value. Furthermore, whenever I produce a “discount” site like this, I don’t give myself the time and opportunity to produce something as beautiful and just right as I could; and here again: when people see your work, they’re going to judge it assuming this was the best you could do–not that it was the best you could do on a cheap budget. And therefore, you will gradually limit yourself to doing this kind of work, as people come to expect that this is the best you can do.
Best solution, from all that I have read, is: decide how good you want it to be, and base your prices (and efforts) on that. Do the best you can, and charge for it; find people who are willing to pay that. And if you ever discount your prices, start by setting their expectations based on what you really want to charge; and if you’re giving them a discount, make it very clear that you are doing so, and why.
Best of luck!
