Okay, hi, well, we're gonna be talking about money today, and everyone wants to talk about money. One of the questions I get asked most by clients and other designers alike is about money. So let's get going. Well, everyone likes to ask questions about money, but not everybody likes to say how much they charge or explain how much a web designer should charge. But this is exactly what I'm going to do now. And it's quite difficult to give out any rates because of course, they fluctuate so much over the globe and between web designers depending on their age and experience, but I've given some really general figures here and they're more based in sort of USA, North America and Europe rather than Asia.

Well, they'll be a little bit less But then again, these things are leveling out pretty fast. So if you're fresh out of college hourly rate would be around $18 to $24 an hour if you've had a few years experience, and now this is the most difficult one to estimate. So maybe you've worked in an agency for two or three or four years, that gives you quite a lot of experience, actually. So you'd be expected to charge about 30 to $50 an hour, something like that. But if you've been working as a web designer for years, and you have lots of regular clients, and maybe you start your own web design business, then you want to be looking at 4060 $50 an hour plus now the reason it goes up quite high for if you're running your own business, that is because you will never work eight billable hours a day.

So in reality, it has to be a little bit more than that because when you're working for somebody else, you work eight hours a day, that's fine. You know, you're going to be designing websites from when you start in the morning at nine o'clock to when you finish at six. Whereas when you run your own business, you may be starting at nine in the morning and finish at six in the evening. But you won't be doing web design all day because you have to do everything else, billing, marketing, etc. But no need to worry because most of the time, you'll be charging a flat rate for jobs. Now, a flat rate is a fee for a completed job.

So maybe it's a website, maybe it's a brochure, maybe it's an HTML, email, an app, anything like that. So it may seem harder to work out in an hourly rate. But after you've been doing it for a few years, you get very good at asking questions around the brief and spot potential pitfalls before they occur and get to know exactly what the client once so you can give them a very accurate flat rate for the job. So the obvious example is website. And we've been through the process of talking to the client about the website and asking about the extent of the functionality. So you can determine exactly what the client wants and charge accordingly.

There's a lot more questions you can ask. And this will apply to all sorts of jobs, not just web design jobs. So you can ask about the text. Is the text to be supplied? Do they have it now? Is it finalized?

Do they need any help with it, some clients will provide very poorly worded texts. So it's almost essential to see the text first before you give them a price. Because if the text needs a lot of work, you can point that out to them and say, You need some help with this and it's going to cost a bit more money. If you want the help. How much text? This is a great question to ask if you have an HTML email, because they can be very different things.

I mean, people can phone you up and say, How much do you charge for a website? or How much do you charge for an email And it's a ridiculous question because it could be $1,000, it could be $10,000. So you need to get the extent and size of the job from the client in order to give them a decent flat rate for it. Now talk about images as well. Do they need images? And if so, do they have images?

Do they have excellent photography? Can you see it? And if you see it, and it looks absolutely terrible, then you have to tell them, I'm going to have to buy stock photography, and they'll have to pay for that. Another question when people ask for a website is do they need a logo very often they ask for a website, and they don't realize that they're going to need a logo as well. Sometimes they will have a logo, but when you ask them to supply it, you find that they don't have a very good copy of it. And you need to tell them either they're gonna have to live with this bad quality low resolution logo or you're gonna have to make up another one for them which will cost extra Of course, so that along with the other questions we have about the accident, Then the number of revisions functionality that we mentioned in previous lectures, that all needs to be accounted for.

And then everything needs to be written down in an email, and itemized. And that's where you get the flat rate fee that you can put in your proposal or in your contract. Now, back to hourly rates, because usually when you have a long term client, you actually go back to hourly rates, so they're satisfied with your work and they know they can trust you, and you just charge them an hourly rate for everything. Now, if you're doing a lot of that, it may be a good idea to use automated invoicing software for this. And here's three suggestions of billing software, you can use fresh books, harvest and free agent. So here are some general points about web design prices.

As you can see from the above, it's necessary to split the job down into its component parts, add them up and charge accordingly. And remember, every cost must be marked up double. So if stock imagery costs $10, you must charge $20. And otherwise, if it's your time you're charging for, you just simply have to estimate the amount of hours it will take you in the worst case scenario and multiply it by your hourly rate. So in effect, flat rate fees, and hourly rates should be the same thing. But it doesn't always work like that.

So you should always bear in mind the worst case scenario. And think about that before giving a price. If somebody asks you for a one page website, you might think it's a very cheap job. And it may well be but are you using their server? Do they have the FTP details for us, and these sorts of situations can take hours and hours and many emails to sort out so don't get greedy. The forces of supply and demand are hard to work against church the correct and honest amount if you've been working for a while You should know what the going rate is.

After a while you'll get happy clients returning to you and others contacting you having received glowing recommendations, make sure your clients understand that they're paying a premium price. Because of the quality of service you offer. Your designs won't look out of date in a year's time. Your websites will work for years and years to come. And this is extremely important. And the reason why you should do this is that you'll only have trouble from clients who want to bargain and you'll have less problems from the premium clients who want to pay extra in order to have things done properly.

So always with billing. Remember to be fair, but remember to give the absolutely top service that you can in order that you charge the premium prices and this is the market you need to go for. You don't want to go for the bargain or even mid range market. You have to go for the Premium market. Okay, thank you very much