First Project a big one, How much should we charge?

Question

Two of my cousins and I started a freelance computer repair/web design business just to make some money on the side during college, and received our first major web design project about three weeks ago. Now we've created websites before, but it was mostly for family businesses and have never really charged money, and most of the websites have been static, and don't really require a CMS.

This project, however, was a big one (for us anyways). We created a news site that had several categories, we created the banners, we created a classifieds page (not a web app just something static that they control). Several links, a few graphical assets, CSS drop down menu, RSS feed from a different news site, weather, all the normal stuff you would find on a regular news site. On top of that we put in all the usual Joomla stuff (search, Jcomments, Jslide pictures, JCE, etc.).

Then we uploaded the first 10 articles they gave us, and we are going to train them how to use Joomla.

Now, at first we decided for 700 dollars. I assumed they just wanted a simple blog like website where they can upload articles. But then we had a meeting, and they asked for a lot more. Note: we did not hard code the template from scratch, but customized the gantry framework to fit their needs. We did code quite a bit however. I estimate that we put in about 50-60 hours in total.

I'm wondering if 700 dollars is a bit low, this price is definitely not set in stone. Please keep in mind that this is our first project, and we are newbies, please be kind.

Thank You!

Answer 1

There's no fixed answer to this. You charge what you think you're worth, based on skills, experience, etc. Now, in simple mathematical terms, $700 over 60 hours is a bit less than $12 an hour. You might want to have a look at the salary results of the 2009 A List Apart survey(I don't think last year's have been published yet.) It's based on yearly salary–there are simple calculators on-line you can use to extrapolate–but also broken down by age group, experience, etc. which will also factor in.

Moving into more subjective territory, with the limited information above I do think this is rather low and that you'll basically be losing money on it at $700, especially split three ways. As just one data point, some initial searching–I don't work with Joomla–turns up installation services ranging anywhere from $50-300. Note: just for installing the software.