I generally work for $60 per hour, with discounts applying to large projects. Rush jobs are a bit more, depending on how rushed they are.
A very easy way to lower your costs with me or any other design company is to have all of your content (including text, photographs, etc) ready to go. A very well-prepared client will also have a site map of the whole website. Having all of that will substantially help your costs by letting the designer do what they do best and most quickly: design.
Naturally, website turnaround varies widely by the setup and how large the page is. A page like the Beacon Group takes several months, while a very small page like Western Whimsy can be done in a day or two, if all of the materials are ready.
I categorize websites into five categories:
• One-page business cards
• Business cards
• Resume or 'medium' sites
• Large sites
• Very large sites
The business card websites do just that: show the same basic information a business card would, but on the web, to show that they're at least serious enough about their company to have a nice website. The one-page sites such as Western Whimsy can take as little as a day (4-8 hours) if the client provides everything that's needed, while the two- to four-page setups (such as Latitude) take more like 7-10 hours. Top
Resume sites are slightly larger, and include past work and qualifications in addition to the business card content. Some are more complicated than others: a simple version would be the Line and Power website. This website is on the large side of this category, because it has so many print example pages, totalling 29 pages. There was also a lot of graphics work in resizing all of the images, and cropping them in those nice little changing squares. Resume sites take between 15 and 30 hours. Top
Large sites. I distinguish these two based on their structure. A large site will have 30 or more pages, or enough work in a few pages to qualify as 'large.' A good example of a large site with few pages is the Impulse Nine music page (note: the page was made partly as an experiment in layers and is not accessible in JAWS; it does work in most browsers, however). The Saddlebrooke site qualifies as a large site because, while most of the site is very simple, it has a great deal of content, and all of it had to be reworked into HTML from a wide variety of sources. These take more than 30 hours to make. Top
Very large sites. These sites require includes to make the navigation possible, have very complicated file structure that is necessitated by many, many parts, require a lot of work, and a lot of time. If you are interested in making a very large site, it's best if you bring all of the elements you'd like to incorporate and decide on how to structure it. I'll happily advise you on how to go about this at a discount, in order to make everyone's life easier. The key with a major site - usually a re-design - is to know what you want before we start. With that, you can get a better site for your budget. An excellent example is the Beacon Group website, which was done with Dreamco. Top