Services and Prices

I encourage you to do as much of the work of website design and production as possible. When I do the work, here are the costs involved.

Basic Policies

Estimates. I will gladly provide an estimate for production of your website. It can only be an estimate, however, since you may change your goals as the work develops, and certain design goals can be considerably more time consuming to achieve than others. However, once work begins, no work will ever be undertaken which will exceed the estimate without your express permission.

Satisfaction. I insist that you be pleased with the result of our working together. I will return your money without question within the first 30 days after site launch, if you are unsatisfied and I cannot satisfy you with a reasonable modification of the site. When we’re finished, the world needs to be a better place, else there’s little point to the whole project!

Payment. Before work on your site begins, you will pay 50% of the agreed upon estimate for your production of your site (plus any fees for hosting or ISP services). When it’s time to launch the site, the balance is due at the time the site is loaded to your website address.

Site pricing examples

(All prices are US dollars.)

Here are examples of how three different sorts of sites might be developed, and their costs. Every real-world website case is individual, and has its own specifications, so consider these simply as examples, not as “packages”, which I don’t offer because they’re too inflexible.

SPECIFICATION: Four pages, content provided by customer, “free” ISP website address used – Total cost: $220.

Content is provided ready to use. One portrait photo is also provided – minimal graphics work on it is required (15 minutes). The customer wants to continue to upload content pages she writes after the site goes public. She quickly arrives at her site design choices, so only 15 minutes consultation was needed initially. The remaining 15 minutes is used to educate her about site maintenance and management, using several free open source programs I provide. She understands that I would be available in the future for brief email consultation about her site, and for longer consults on a fee basis, if needed (see Costs, below).

SPECIFICATION: Eight pages, content provided but editing needed, domain purchase and set up handled by me – Total cost: $435.

In this example, the customer produces all their own content, but pays me for 30 minutes to do some editing that is needed. His photograph needs some modifications (resizing, color adjustment, contrast and brightness adjustment), which take 15 minutes. I set up his new website domain for him. Using written materials I provide, concerning use of the free open source web page and website management software I also provide, he decides he can take over the site himself once it’s launched, but reserves the possibility of consulting with me in the future.

SPECIFICATION: Twelve pages, content generally ready for uploading, some graphic element production needed (45 minutes), domain already purchased and set up – Total price: $535.

In this example, little consultation is needed, beyond that which addresses site management and maintenance when the site is turned over to the customer. Photos (3) are provided properly formatted and adjusted for the Internet. Brief editing (30 minutes) of content required.

Pricing schedule

(All prices are US dollars.)

Initial consultation – in which each element in the Development Process is addressed – 30 minutes: no charge. After that, see consultation, below.

Consultation – on any aspect of the Development Process, at any time after the Initial Consultation, $75 an hour, in 15 minute increments, but the clock doesn’t start until after the first 5 minutes. (This allows for email and telephone contacts for brief consultation which typically need to be made during the site development process.) Consultation is usually needed if you want the site turned over to you for full management when it’s finished. The more you know about the process, the less will be needed.

Writing or editing of website content (if desired) – $75/hour, in 15 minute increments.

Graphic element location or production – $75 hour, in 15 minute increments. Note that graphics, especially photographs, may need modification to make them suitable for use on a website. This is usually not an involved process, if we start with good material.

Layout design proposals – Assuming we are doing something other than a modification of a design in my Portfolio, then four sketches per your specifications – no charge. Reasonable modification of any of the four – no charge. Additional designs – see Graphic element…, above.

Color design concepts – four palettes, up to 4-8 fundamental colors each – priced same as Layout… above.

Style sheet development and “tweaking” – no charge.

Per page production charge (content provided) – $50 each for the first eight pages, $20 each for the next five, $15 each for every page after that.

Internet location procurement – $25 for set up, plus any initial fees required by hosting service or ISP.

Site management and maintenance, post-launch – $75 an hour, in 15-minutes increments. (The degree to which this will be needed will depend upon your level of comfort in working with site management software on your own.)

Programming (CGI, SSI, etc.) – $95 an hour. (This is rarely needed.)

Production time

Typically, with site-ready content, graphics requiring little or no modification, and a straightforward page layout, three to five working days will be more than enough time to get a working prototype running on my server. If weekend work is required, the process may be slowed a little, as server staff is often less available for technical adjustments which may be needed to load a site.

The site is developed on my server and moved to yours only when we both agree it’s ready for the public. That transfer, coupled with any publicity in which we engage, “launches” the site.

Post-launch maintenance of your website

Post launch scenarios

What happens after your website goes public?

• Worst case scenario: nothing happens. Your website’s frozen in time, with no corrections (which, in reality, always need to occur), and no new content added as time passes.
• Best case scenario: content is refreshed over time, both by revisions to existing content (editing, rewriting, etc.), and by addition of completely new content.

There ARE a few cases in which the “worst” case is quite good enough – but usually only for a certain period of time, after which you site will surely need maintenance work. If you want your site to actively work for you, you will most likely need to freshen its content regularly – at least every two months or so.

More than that, consider the fact that web software technology is a fast-moving field. Technology improves, and your website will need to be updated to reflect this. Content updates will likely need to occur more often than technology updates, but technology updates are actually rather common, and may well need to occur several times a year. (On my own sites, they occur several times a month.)

Active maintenance – a division of labor?

You can do your own website maintenance to the extent that…

• You have a rather decent grounding in XHTML or HTML, CSS (cascading style sheet) language, web servers, and the software needed to address all of this competently and efficiently; or…
• You can work directly IN the webpage HTML (not a difficult skill to learn, should you be unfamiliar with it), and you strictly limit your website changes to the sections of webpages containing text content, and also manage relations with the web server hosting your site.

You should have someone else do it to the extend that…

• You have not the technical skill to accomplish the task; or
• This technical work bores you silly; or
• You have not the time to do the work (and the less you know the more time it will take).

Now, what is usually most realistic is a division of labor. The more you understand, the more you can do for yourself, which is good. However, engagement of technical specialists will be needed, beyond that point.

If I do site maintenance for you…

Scope of work. I can do any of the tasks involved in creating and launching the site, but would expect to do them simply on an as-needed basis. I do not usually do writing for website customers,, although so I can, since in my “other” professional life I write frequently. Editing is most certainly within my scope of work, if this is desired.

Pricing. This is a challenging subject. There are traditionally two choices:

1. I charge you a fixed monthly fee. I don’t like this idea, because payment is not linked to work done. One of us is going to lose, and that isn’t an appealing prospect.
2. I encourage you to do as much of the work as you are able, and I do the rest, at my usual hourly rate. I believe this alternative is best for all concerned, and provides some motivation for you to become increasingly self-sufficient.

My preferred way of working is to receive what might be called a “work order” from you, for which I then provide an estimated cost for completion of the work. My goal will always be to complete the work at less than the estimate. My promise is that the work will not cost more than the estimate. This gives us both the chance to wisely manage our resources – your money and my time.

Your work orders might be for corrections to one or more pages, or updates to pages. Or it might for a whole-site technological upgrade, or a restructuring of the site. The work normally would be done on weekends, and only after you approve my cost estimate.

Template-only option

It is possible for me to provide only a page template. This makes sense when you have the skills and tools to take such a template and develop a site from it, to your specifications.

A template is a file containing the HTML for the page, plus additional files containing the CSS styling rules. To work with such materials successfully, one must have reasonable familiarity with HTML and with CSS2. (For information about both these technologies, and much more, please see my resource index page.)

BENEFITS and SPECIFICATIONS of this template

(Costs are given below.)

Coding

The template uses state-of-art HTML 4.01 strict, which means that all modern browsers will know exactly what to do with it, and will NOT flip into “quirks” mode rendering of the HTML (the outcome of which is much harder to control and predict). (See Quirks Mode, for more on this problem.

Organization

The template utilizes a clear, sensibly organized structural layout plan, and an outline of this structure will be provided to you. The template may be thus be easily managed using any HTML editor capable of displaying page structure output (as most are).

Layout uses CSS, not tables

Except when organizing and presenting data (the proper use of tables), all page layout is accomplished using CSS2 specifications, NOT tables. This is the way pages are supposed to be laid out, according to the W3C (see also Cascading Style Sheets). This greatly speeds up content insertion and editing, as well as rendering of page layout in browsers, which distinctly improves user experience.

Styling will be kept separate from page structure

Template structure specification will be in the page HTML, while styling will be exclusively specified in multiple CSS style sheets. This makes it much easier to accomplish sweeping changes in webpage appearance – “styling”, such as changes in colors, fonts, font size, component size, image backgrounds, list formatting, and even component placement. One needs simply to edit one file, instead of every page in the website. Pages load into the user’s browser significantly more quickly, when styled this way.

No scripting

Use of either server side (PHP, etc.) or browser-based (javascript) programming can greatly extend the webpage features. However, it has some serious side-effects, which make it desirable to avoid either form of scripting whenever possible:

• Costs increase: Programmers must be involved. Programming is expensive. Use of programmers is usually not a one-time thing, because “bugs” in the programming invariably show up, after site launch.
• Flexibility is constrained: Changes in webpage functionality, and too often in layout as well, are simply beyond the skill set of many webpage managers, as they cannot be done with HTML and CSS alone.
• Cross-browser reliability is threatened: This is an issue with browser based (javascript) programming. Every browser processes javascript somewhat differently, so testing of programming must be done to ensure reliability. This increases costs significantly.

Reliability

Because all the major (and minor) browsers render webpages using their own custom built rendering engines (no one likes to share their programming), and they don’t all work the same way, webpage designers must face the problem of getting a page to look the same in all browsers. In my custom templates, this problem is solved in two ways:

1. Consideration is given only to the major browsers known to be in use on the Internet, which constrains the problem to the largest single group of users.
2. Corrective CSS files are employed – developed and tested by programmers at Yahoo!, and part of the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). This has the very nice effect of eliminating the differences between browsers. Working from this secure base, the resulting webpage is stable and reliable – it should appear the same in all major browsers currently in use.

OPTION: Search tool

Description. An excellent, free search functionality can be provided by your site, using Freefind.com. This is probably best set up so that search output appears within a page of your website, rather than using the generic page they provide. The result is a fairly typical search output page, which directs users only to content on your site.

Rationale. Why provide this to your users? Two reasons: it’s expected by many site visitors, and it provides excellent access to site content.

OPTION: Site index

Description. This is a page or set of pages, providing an index to the site, much like one might find in a book. The meaningful content on each page of the site is processed by a specially written computer program, and from it are extracted all non-trivial words. In addition, there is an option to associate with each page a set of “tags” or “keywords”. These tags may be made entirely invisible to site visitors, if desired. If present, they become major index terms, with all others being considered minor terms.

All terms are then used to generate the index. After each term in the index will appear links to the pages on which the term may be found. Use of this system allows the website manager to give more weight to some index terms than others, while having complete control over output format. There as no “false hits”.

Rationale. Basically, this is an alternative to search. Search functionality has problems – it IS exhaustive, but there are a lot of “false” hits in the search output, which waste time. One also has limited control over the output format. Then there are those obnoxious ads. Finally, browsing capability is constrained to whatever the search engine manages to produce. Use of a site index solves these problems.

OPTION: Content extraction from an existing site

This is useful for some situations when an existing site is to be transferred to a new site template.

Description. I have written a computer program to extract core content from a set of website pages. The product of its use is a set of files, each of which is named with the title of the source page on the site. Each file will contain core content of the page, using the HTML coding of the original page. This content is then ready for you to modify, if desired, and insert into your new template page.

Rationale. While manual extraction is quite feasible for a site with a small number of pages, at some point, this method become burdensome. That’s where automatic site content extraction can be a great convenience and time saver.

OPTION: Google analytics

Description. Google.com provides to any webmaster who wishes it a free website visitor analysis functionality which, while designed for users of their ad placement business, is also very useful for websites which do not employ Google ads. Many serious website designers use this excellent free service.

It provides a wealth of useful site visitor reports, and is not difficult to set up or use (other than for the fact that one has many options to consider in report generation – and that’s not a setup issue). It will tell you things like visitor origins, site pages which provoke the greatest interest with visitors, points of entry into the site, page paths visitors take through the site, pages from which visitors most frequently exit the site, and so on. All this is available simply for the asking.

Rationale. Site visitor response to a website is typically a complete unknown. Visitor action tracking can give a very good view of this response. With this information, one can see what part of ones site content really interests users, as well as how long they engage the site, and how many visitors one is receiving. This can be vital information informing your further development of your site

COSTS

Every effort has been made to keep costs as low as possible. The majority of the work in developing a website goes into getting the page template set up and working. Well done, this enables reasonably easy insertion of page after page of content, with much time being saved, compared to use of old-style table-formatted pages employing in-place styling. The difference is truly dramatic.

All prices include 45 minutes of consultation, if needed.

• webpage template (all components in place – including navigation template): $150
• template with navigation setup (including main navigation and breadcrumbs line if desired): add $10
• template with search set up: add $10
• template with Google analytics set up: add $5
• content extraction from existing site: $4 per page, up to 15 pages; $3 a page after that. (Content will be provided to you in a file named with the original page title, containing the HTML coding of the original page, ready for you to modify and insert into your template page.)
• site index production:
  • initial index: $30
  • monthly service (with re-indexing, on request, up to 4 times a month): $8

Consulting

Sometimes people want to do the work themselves, but want some informed guidance about various matters. This makes sense, often, and can result in tremendous cost reductions, for taking the wrong turn at a critical junction can be very expensive in time or money, as I can personally attest to.

If you want to consult with me, my consulting fee is $85 an hour, billed in 15 minutes increments. Any topic about which I can offer expertise is open for consultation.

And now…

If you’re ready to talk specifics, contact me. If you have questions…I have answers!