Hard costs, or material costs, are the materials for production. These are usually fixed costs determined by service providers, not by you. For example, a Wix Studio site has a fixed monthly or annual fee, regardless of the time you spend designing and programming it. Monthly payments have their advantages and disadvantages.
One of the (many) reasons I chose Squarespace back then and continue to use it and love it to this day is because Squarespace contains and controls the entire system. A few years ago, Google decided that it wanted the Internet to switch to secure websites, from http to https. And since Google basically controls the world, all website owners jumped on the bandwagon of secure websites. Most of the time, my clients were able to complete edits and update the site's content by themselves.
By the end of the lesson, customers were sure they could orient themselves to the back of the site and edit the text, photos, banners, background colors, and search engine descriptions. They could also create pages, move content blocks, and edit the links and descriptions of the pages themselves. They will learn the best practices for blogging and how to use a summary block to show specific parts of the content of your blog and take them to certain pages. Your client's site is a vital part of their business, and I believe they should have total control and knowledge of it.
Before hiring a web designer, take the time to outline a clear plan for how you want your website to look and work. On the other hand, designing websites for customers in restaurants, retail stores, hospitality, non-profit organizations, and education generally pays less. Creating a new website from scratch will cost more, since you'll have to complete the entire web design process, including initial steps, such as research, user experience design strategy, site mapping, wireframe, and website information architecture. Some designers bill customers for these items and then pay service providers on their behalf, sometimes adding a small surcharge to cover the management of the payment.
In the end, web design prices are as dynamic as the designers themselves, shaped by a combination of the client's skills, circumstances, and objectives. That's why many designers I know perfect a client's project, launch their site, and then offer to stay in exchange for a monthly fee to manage any updates or maintenance the client may need in the future. Some web design pricing packages include basic SEO settings, such as optimizing page titles and meta descriptions, but advanced SEO and fully managed SEO are often a complementary service. Remember that website design prices vary greatly depending on the complexity of your needs and the designer's level of experience.
This is a good option if your web design projects vary significantly from client to client: simpler projects charge for fewer hours and more complex projects charge for longer hours. By considering these industry-specific factors when pricing web design, B2B and non-profit organizations can obtain more accurate quotes and create websites that truly support their business objectives or social missions. In addition, some platforms also come with an AI-based website design generator, a feature that creates designs based on textual descriptions. Some website builders will only do one or the other, while others will use both payment models depending on the customer and the scope of any given web design project.
Once you have a few projects under your belt, create a web design portfolio that highlights your range of skills and showcases your work.
