The Down and Dirty Cost of Creating a Website for a Business
April 13, 2007 – 12:01 pmIn How Much Does it Cost to Build a Website I gave some general guidelines regarding web site setup pricing. But I felt that the prices for web design and development could be broken down even more. Here’s the continuation of our in-depth look at the cost for building a website.
Establishing a baseline hourly rate
First things first, we need a baseline. Bajooter doesn’t charge hourly (and neither should any good developer or consultant) but we do use an hourly estimate to make sure we can at least pay the bills. Standard hourly rate is between $75 and $100/hr. Here’s how we get that number.
The going hourly rate of a programmer
Let’s start with the going rate for a programmer which is about $62,890, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook. That comes to $30.24/hr.
Corporate benefits are really nice
Of course we’re talking about a corporate job here, which also pays for:
- Health, dental, and vision coverage: $10,880/yr
- Professional development (books, conferences, training, etc): $3,720/yr
- Paid vacation and holidays: $3,628.80
- Accountant, attorney, business advisor: $8,500/yr
- Retirement (401k, IRA, life insurance): $900/yr
That brings our total added benefits up to $27,628.80. Which means we’ve got to add an additional 13.28/hr. So now we’re up to $43.52/hr.
Compensating for non-billable time
There’s one problem with our figures, however. Only about half of that time is actually billable so we’d have to double the total hourly rate to $87.04/hr. And I’m being really conservative with all of these numbers.
There’s more coming so stay tuned
In an upcoming couple of posts we’ll address the question “how much does a 10 page website cost?” in order to determine the average cost of a good website. Lastly we’ll discuss hourly rates versus value based fees.