web-design pricing/business model

A friend of mine does consulting, his clients are profesionals. Many have asked him to help them get a website going.

He would like to charge them $1500 for a site (he keeps 20%, I get the rest for setting up the site). His idea is to give them several templates to choose from, they provide the content. I load it up on the template. We're done.

If they want changes down the road (swapping out pictures, coding changes, whatever) they will be charged for each change they want made. The sites will be on my server.

He expects to send me two clients/month.

While the money is tempting (an extra $2400/month would be helpful right now), I am concerned about what happens 'down the road'.

I expect that most people will outgrow a starter template within a year or two. That they won't be happy with the site after that, and I won't enjoy nickle and diming them to death for every change they want made. Besides, I don't really relish having 20, 30, 50 people all bugging me to make changes on their sites, keeping track of individual billing, all that.

I suggested he charge them $1500 - annually - and that would include the starter site and ongoing maintenance, afterwards only charging extra for major redesigns... He says the market won't bear that.

Getting around to my question.... how much do you charge for a profesional site, 20 - 30 pages, bio's on the staff, info about services offered, that type of thing?

And do you charge an ongoing maintenance fee, or do it piecemeal?

My past experience is just designing my own sales sites, I'm pretty successful with that, but I am very seo dependent. That can go bust at any time, so something that is not dependent on the search engines would be beneficial to my long term survival..... but I'm torn about whether this will be worthwhile... or just an ongoing headache..... advice, thoughts, suggestions, please

Chris

 

we normally charge about $100 per page, if the clients are professional I would expect them to pay for a good site. If using templates, make sure you customize it very well. I would be very upset if I paid $1500 for a website and browse across another site that looks the same as mine.

 

Yeah, me too... You should use CSS and XHTML to build the templates as it means that all you need to make are a few different layouts to start with, then you can easilt change the look at feel, without too much mucking about...

Why not set the client up on a CMS so that the only changes you really need to make are to do with the actual architecture of the site.

WordPress is very flexible

 

$80 per page

.psd

 

Normal price is about $50 per page but it depends on quality of work too.
For any one you want to choose, See previous works of him.