If you're a website designer who is charging hourly for your website design projects, you're amends and updates, then I hate to tell you this, but you are
doing it wrong.
You are leaving money on the table.
You are damaging your client relationship, and you are most likely damaging your confidence as well.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple with me, Holly Christie. I'm a website designer, a website designers mentor, and the host of
this podcast. I'm here to help you if you are working in the web design space.
So that could be a designer, a developer, SEO specialist, potentially even a copywriter or branding specialist. If you work in an industry that mainly works
with websites, then this podcast has been made for you. I'm here to help you have a better business, to earn more money, to improve your skillset and to
enjoy it all along the way.
So, you ready? Let's get started. So today I'm talking about charging hourly because this is something that still comes up time and time and time again. And
I have my Sparks Group mentoring programme as well — we were on our group mentoring call last week, and I spoke to the 10 designers and developers and SEO
specialists in there and said, how much are we all charging as an hourly rate?
And everybody was able to give an hourly rate. Everybody was saying, oh, this is what it is.
It kind of feels a little bit like a trick question because the real answer is I don't charge hourly, and there is a reason for that. Hourly is often the time
where people are exchanging their expertise for a set amount of money.
And when you look at how much that expertise would cost, it's a little bit like how long is a piece of string. Yes, there is an industry standard. In general,
most website developers will be kind of hovering around the 50 pound mark. Some will be at a hundred pounds mark, some will be at 75. There's no kind of set
rate, and most web designers tend to set their hourly rate against another web designer's rate.
So they might be on a group mentoring call finding out what other people are charging, or they might see it on their developer's websites, or they might ask
a client what their previous designer or developer was charging. Sometimes they'll undercut and think, oh well, maybe I'll just do this or that.
A baseline — the only really successful businesses are the ones which don't exchange time for money. The ones who say, this is the cost of a project, this
is how much the project will cost you. And there are all different ways of doing that. You can say, as a web designer, that I will only work on projects that
take me three hours or more, or I will bundle all the web design changes and then I'll only do them when it gets to a certain amount of hours work.
Really how you choose to divvy up your projects and how you prioritise them is up to you. Building project pricing is very different to hourly pricing because
this is really building a lot more on expertise than it is if you were just to say, yeah, I'll go and get those changes done.
Another thing about when we charge hourly is that it can make it quite hard to prioritise work, because if you are getting paid the same rate for whether you
are building a website, whether you're making some amends on a website, whether you are just adding in a mailing form or something like that, it's hard to
decide which one you're gonna do at which time.
And consequently, you're gonna have to be really disciplined to make sure that you are servicing your clients as per the agreement that you've got with them.
So when you book something as a project, it's much easier to say to them, right, I've booked in the project and the start date for that project is going to be
whatever date — you'll hear from me with an update at whatever date, whatever your terms of service says as well.
Project pricing should also allow for scope creep. I have done other episodes on scope creep because it's such a big part of the industry. And you know, I get
it that a lot of our clients aren't visual people, so they don't know what the change is or the update or the website, whatever. They don't know what that's
gonna look like until they actually see it.
And then they see it and they think, oh, that's brilliant, or that's not so brilliant. And can I just see it like this? Can we add this in? Oh, I've got a
photo I think will really work with this. Or, oh, I see where you were going with that — another website I saw had a video on their website.
Can we add one in here? And the next thing you know, that three hour project that you planned now has another hour's work involved, but you've already quoted
the client three hours. Then when you go back and say, well yeah, we can do that, but it's gonna cost another hour, another hour and a half.
The client kind of feels cheated. They think, well, no, I'm just giving feedback. This should be included in feedback. Look at bundling pricing for a
project. You are not just looking in the same way with like a web design — if you were doing a brand new design, you wouldn't say, well, that's gonna take me
30 hours.
I work at 50 an hour. Therefore, the price of this project is going to be 30 times 50. It doesn't look like that because we have to look at the expertise
we're bringing to the table. We have to look at the tech setup, running the tech updates, all the different things that go into it. The final testing — what
happens if at the final round of testing we activate some plugins and there are errors within the website?
Yeah, there are so many reasons that we go to project pricing when it comes to website builds. We need to look at that project pricing for all of the stuff
that we do within our work. Booking things as projects can be a lot easier as well, because once a client gets used to that kind of structure, they don't
think, they've told me it's three hours — I think it's just a quick little job.
I know I'm using this three hour analogy a lot, but so many clients think, oh, I had a DIY website myself once, and therefore I think just putting an image and
a container on a page is a quick job.
Of course it's not. If you think about when we're working with images — we're resizing them, we're changing them to WebP format, we're renaming them, we're
putting alt text in there, we're positioning them, we're doing all the SEO work as well. And that's all the hidden behind-the-scenes stuff that goes into your
project pricing rather than your hourly pricing.
As I was explaining earlier, it just helps clients feel more secure, settled, and less argumentative in what they're getting if we're quoting per project.
So the other thing that using project pricing helps us to do is it helps us to work with white labellers and freelancers. And there are always times where web
designers just get inundated with work.
If you're not inundated with work, I strongly recommend that you go back and listen to some of the previous episodes of this podcast, because it tells you
how to build your brand, how to market yourself, how to get clients. I also have a course at websitesmadesimple.co.uk — it's how to get clients for your web
design business.
And this will essentially give you a three month plan on how to show up, how to market yourself. It's got some email templates, it's got everything you need to
really turn it around. And when you have turned it around, you have the opportunity of working with freelancers, white labellers, or even tech VAs,
depending on what it is that you're doing.
Having a project price allows you to choose who is going to work on that project because you're not trading time for money. You're not thinking, oh, well
I would charge 60 an hour, but a tech VA is 35 an hour, so really I should only be charging the client 30 an hour — actually I need to put another five pounds
on because I'm the one doing the invoicing.
It just takes up headspace that you don't need to be allocating to. You just charge per project, say to the white labeller or freelancer, this is what the
project costs — would you like to work and do it? And that's how it's done. Ultimately, you'll also always be cheaper than an agency. Agencies charge
extortionate amounts for websites and website amendments — they take a very long time to get round to them.
And I know that I'm generalising. I know that there will be micro agencies who are a lot more honest around these things or they don't have such high overheads
or whatever else. But usually people will always favour where they have paid more for this as well. So don't worry. Even if someone comes back and says, oh,
that really is a lot of money.
It wasn't what I was expecting to pay. So that's how much it costs. And yeah, if you can't pay it, I do understand — and totally understand if you use someone
else, because I know that it can feel really nerve-wracking to turn down any form of money. But trust me, if they can't afford you, they're not your people.
The ones who can't afford you are the ones who will be haggling every single bit. You know, especially if you're charging hourly — and again, you're building
your business. This is just headspace that you don't need to be taking up. So really do bear that in mind. The nice thing with project pricing as well is it
means that clients always really know where they're at with things, because they know the project costs this much, even if they scope creep it a little bit, as
long as they're not massively scope creeping.
In which case I have got an episode which tells you how to deal with that — which is basically bring it back to: I'm gonna need to requote for this project,
or if we change the scope, then I need to quote on top of what you've already paid as well. It really does settle people to know where they're at, knowing
what the bill's gonna be.
And I've just taken on a new client recently whose website was absolutely fine, but she said the designer just kept coming back with, oh, and by the way, you're
gonna need to pay for this. And I've decided that I'm going to add a plugin and you are gonna have to pay for the plugin. And she said, I just felt —
I never knew each month whether I was gonna have to pay more and more for my website. So really being clear with costs — even if your costs are higher. And I
do recommend that bundling into project pricing, you do quote slightly higher. It just gives everyone that peace of mind — and ultimately when people are
choosing their website designer, they're choosing peace of mind.
So do bear that in mind. Project pricing as well will help you to get better quality clients. Now, I've talked about this all the way through — you won't get
people who are haggling. You get people who are confident, settled, and secure in working with you. And when you have clients like that, it means that you can
be confident, comfortable, and secure in your work as well.
So if you feel like you're excluding some of those lower paying clients or whatever else, it's because you're opening up the way for those better clients
to come along to you as well.
So that's it for today. I hope I have absolutely convinced you to charge per project rather than per hour.
You also heard me mention the Sparks Group mentoring programme that runs every single Wednesday from one till two PM. It's a secure space for website
designers, developers, and SEO specialists to come in and to have an hour of group mentoring with me, to have a mastermind with the other people in the
group, to talk about anything industry related.
There is no subject off the table other than the one rule: we do not do shame. Everybody has a different setup. Everybody's welcome at the table. And if you
think that this form of mentoring would be right for you, go to Websites Made Simple co dot uk and you'll see Sparks Group Mentoring there — go and check it
out.
In the meantime, if you have any feedback, any thoughts, anything you would like to share with me about your own experience of pricing per project or
pricing per hour, you can find me at hello at Websites Made Simple dot co dot uk. Or go to the website, go to the podcast page — you'll see there's a form you
can fill in and you can even leave me a voice note from there.
Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.