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Many web designers fall into a trap by pricing their services lower than they should, which can have a serious impact on their business. Here is a quick look at the many different ways that under pricing your services can hurt you.

Lower Income

Obviously, charging lower prices will mean that you’ll make less from each project. Of course, the mindset of many designers is that they can ultimately make more money by charging lower prices and attracting more business. While that can be true in some cases, it will require you to work considerably more hours to earn the same amount that you could make with higher rates.

Attracts Bargain Shoppers

Many potential clients will contact designers based on their prices. From my experience, if a potential client mentions that they’re contacting you because your prices are low, this is a very bad sign. These types of bargain shoppers can be some of the most difficult clients to deal with. Sure, I understand that business owners need to be wise with their expenses, and that includes the amount that they pay for a website. However, these types of clients often don’t understand the huge gap in quality and types of services that are available. They want an award winning website for a thrift store price.

If you are pricing your work low, be prepared for clients that are looking for something that is too good to be true. Some clients will expect you to jump through hoops to create a site that is worth 3 times what they are willing to pay. Personally, I’d prefer to work for a client that has chosen me because of my abilities, my experience, or just about any other factor than my price.

Perceived Value from Clients is Lower

I’ve noticed over a period of time that your prices have some effect on the client’s perspective. If a client sees a low price tag it is natural to classify you in the same category with other designers that charge similar rates. Hopefully that is an accurate evaluation in your situation, but if your prices are too low you may be leading your clients to undervalue your work. Sometimes by charging a little bit more you can cause clients to see your work as being a bit higher quality. I don’t think this really applies to the bargain shoppers, but more so to those clients that are a bit more educated on the subject of web design and what it really costs.

Your Own Opinion of Your Work is Lower

How much is your time worth? What price do you deserve? If your prices are too low you may be subconsciously convincing yourself that your work is not worth more. Being able to charge a higher rate and having clients that are willing to pay that much may be a positive boost for your confidence. As a creative art, web design can be affected positively or adversely by your mindset.

Your Work Suffers

If you are not making very much from a project you may rush through it so that you can finish and move on to something else. I know I’ve found myself in this situation before. It’s easy to say “I’m only making $X for this work, I don’t need to do any better than this.” As a result, your work will be less than your best. If you’re making a reasonable amount you should be able and willing to do your best work.

Attracts Tire-Kickers

Potential clients that aren’t serious or dedicated to actually going through with a project will contact designers with low prices 9 out of 10 times. You’ll spend your time talking to them about what you can offer, how much it will cost, how long it will take, and every other detail they want to know. Then they still won’t go through with it. Of course, not every potential client will choose you, that’s just the nature of being a service provider. However, you can eliminate some of these potential clients that really aren’t that serious by quoting a higher price.

You Wind Up Competing Based On Price

Competing based on a low price has worked well for Wal-Mart, but it’s not a good idea for most designers. If your main selling point is that your price is lower than your competition, you will attract clients that you probably wish you hadn’t attracted, and you’ll really never be able to raise your prices unless all of your competitors do. If someone comes into the market and undercuts your price, then what do you do? Instead, focus on providing the highest quality work and the best service possible. You may even want to specially if that gives you an advantage, but avoid making price your main selling point.

What’s Your Opinion?

Do you have anything from your experience to add to the conversation?

StevenGleave.co.uk

Steven Gleave a freelancer from Kent in the UK, working to master and showcase modern trends, nice showcase here.

Freshe.st

Freshest Web Design in Northern Ireland, is one static page, with one designer at work -Bill Morrison, but the 1-pager with a fresh slant on a linen canvas background is a thing of beauty. I really love the clean layout and vector floral style illustration, expect more content from B.M. in the future.

YeahStyleDG.com

Another freelance portfolio, this one from Alvaro Casanova (aka Yeahstyle), a 21-year old Uruguayan graphic designer based in Santiago de Chile. This one is a different take with the thumbnail images on the homepage almost reminding me of piano keys. A very colorful site.

Designchuchi.ch

A May 1st reboot site… a great grid layout and a good mix of graphic elements.

Ijsfontein.nl

Another designer portfolio, this one’s not in English and looks to be from Amsterdam. The flash transition text treatment, and abstract design are quite nice here.

Qualeasuamania.com.br

Late to the party, I should of had this site added for last weeks celebration of Cinco de Mayo. Click the Sim button to enter the site.

ArtSpaceTokyo.com

From the website intro, “Art Space Tokyo acts as your 272 page personal guide and interpreter, connecting you with the neighborhoods and figures behind some of the most inspiring art spaces in this colossal city. …”

GingerMonkeyDesign.com

You’ve just got to love a site called “Ging-ah-r-r… Mon-k-a-a-ay”, aka the “Auburn Ape”.

The vector-illustrated swirly-floral and color graphic designs appear to be mostly print works and of rockstar quality, to which we say… “keep up the monkey business gingerMonkey…”. In December of 2006 Ginger Monkey’s head honcho, Tom Lane got to do a Computer Arts magazine cover for the “Future Trends” special edition, further evidence of his Rock Star skill-set. Aww-sch-ome sch-tuff ginger monk-ee!

AcrossAmerica.robWeychert.com

There’s still time to catch up on Rob’s travels on his 8,600 mile route across America during the month of May. Rob is no slouch in the design field, be sure to check out his domain RobWeychert.com for other interesting projects and esoteric shenanigans. Besides if you follow Rob’s adventure you won’t have to spend your stimulus check on the gas money and get stranded a third of the way through the journey.

JasonReedWebDesign.com

Mootools assets used to great effect and XHTML 1.0 strict valid code. I like the carousel within the tab, and the fact all of the sliding panels resize if the text is expanded. Many sites fall flat on this issue.

Cool Link of the Week:

Processing.js

From the “Brain Trust” known as John Resig this week, John is sharing the fruit of his labors over the past 7-months of ultimate geekery producing a possible flash-killer or certainly a viable alternative in some cases.

This project known as Processing.js taps the power of the Processing visualization language using javascript and the Canvas element, to produce it’s quasi-stellar effects.

Don’t miss the demos:

• 91 basic demos.
• 51 larger, topical, demos.
• 4 custom “in the wild” demos.

You may have heard of John, he’s the Javascript Ninja who invented the ever popular jQuery .js library.

Thanks for sharing this with us mere mortals John —fantastic stuff!

Rant for the Week:

Why can’t we get a good deal on Computer Arts magazine subscriptions here in the U.S.? Be on the lookout for bootleg .pdf copies of back-issues, or better yet maybe there will be some DVD collections soon.

You build your website so people will see it, but how do you know how many people are seeing results of your hard work?

There are a number different ways you can track your website usage, below we take a look at the different options, along with the pros & cons and some examples of software or services that use that approach.

• Remotely Hosted Javascript

  This is currently the most popular way to track your website visitors. Javascript embedded into your website is used to pass information to a remote server, which stores that information and produces reports, often in realtime, on your website visitors.

  Pros:

  Everything is handled for you. All you need do is add a small amount of javascript to your pages, and the visitors are tracked. No need to worry about buying additional servers, or additional bandwidth requirements.

  Cons:

  The cost. Although some free options do exist they can be limited in functionality, or will require you to display a button or other form of ad in exchange for using the service. Only users with Javascript enabled are completely tracked, some services fall back to a simple 1px image being embeded to your page to track visits, but this doesn’t provide as detailed visitor information.

  Examples:

  Google Analytics
  http://www.google.com/analytics

  Sitemeter
  http://www.sitemeter.com

  Reinvigorate
  http://reinvigorate.net

  StatCounter
  http://statcounter.com

  AdFreeStats
  http://www.addfreestats.com

  whos.amung.us
  http://whos.amung.us

  Offers some very basic visitor information but is very easy to setup, and provides realtime information that can easily shared with your users.

• Locally Hosted Javascript

  Similar to the remotely hosted services above, locally hosted software can perform the same function, whilst allowing you to keep control of all parts of the analysis process.

  Pros:

  Having control of all your information is a must for some people, also running all the scripts locally allows you to have more control of the overall performance of your websites.

  Cons:

  The scripts recording the visitors details, and reporting scripts to view visit information can add a lot of extra load on your web servers, and depending on your traffic numbers may even warrant getting a separate hosting package to deal with statistics.

  Mint
  http://www.haveamint.com

  Developed by Shaun Inman, Mint is a very popular among web designers and developers.

• Web server logfile analysis

  Whether you use Apache, IIS, or some other web server to host your website, they are usually configured to record each and every request that visitors make. There is software that can analyze these logs and create reports for you detailing visitor numbers, their activity.

  Although the reports generated with this method can be very detailed there is a delay in generating these reports, as you have to collect and process the logs before the reports can be produced.

  Pros:
  Any and all visitors to the website can be tracked, including search engine bots, and other automated services.

  No additional load is placed on your servers during website visits. Log file analysis can be scheduled to occur during off peak times.

  Cons:
  The information that is tracked about your visitors is limited to the information that the webserver is configured to track. If you don’t have complete access to the web server configuration (on a shared host for example) you will not be able to control this.

  Since files have to analyzed and reports generated after the visit, the information is not available in realtime.

  Urchin
  http://www.google.com/urchin

  Now owned by Google, the Urchin software is free, and needs to be installed on your server, and produces reports similar to the Google Analytic’s service.

  WebTrends
  http://www.webtrends.com

• Script Embeded

  Software packages exist, that when embeded into your web pages can record the visitor information to a database. This information can then be used to generate user reports.

  Pros:

  Since the script is executed during the website visit you are able to add extra information from the webserver while the script is being execute to the statistics you are saving.

  Cons:

  Your website must be written in the same language the stats package to function correctly.

  Since the visitor information is saved during the page request, this can delay the return of the page to the user.

  Slimstat
  http://wettone.com/code/slimstat

  Based on the ShortStat software by Shaun Inman, extended to add extra functionality and to improve security, since Short Stats was discontinued. SlimStat can be incorporated into any PHP based website.

What is your favorite way of tracking visitor information?

Bird-Malaysia.com

A great combo of strong typography and photography. The page banner images do a nice job of extending the subject matter beyond the boundaries of the box, to bring the birds to the foreground of the page design.

GreatUrbanPetEscapes.ca

Bread and Butter!

Looking for a design on a certain subject matter (pets), and certain recent submissions to the CSS galleries stand out. This recent entrée at CSSMania caught my eye. Man’s best friend looks particularly apropos on the homepage if not downright anthropomorphic, thanks to Cash Cab for improving my vocabulary on that last wordy-word.

Nkmip.com

Nk’Mip Resort, Osoyoos - British Columbia Canada

9web.co.uk

Exceptional grid layout at work in this clean and straightforeward design approach, with some script.aculo.us bits thrown in for good measure.

AdLitteram.be

Flash concept intros on many of the pages highlight this evocative red palette site.

BradFrostWeb.com/blog

A novel page concept, the content of the blog, scrolls inside the mouth, that resizes to fit the window.

MarchandDeTrucs.com

I don’t speak french, but I had a feeling before translating it that this site was a magic/novelty shop. I just love the sound of the bell going off as though people are going in and out of the shop. The illustration is quite magical… good stuff. Link for French to English translation site, hope this works.

Stampede-Design.com

A web services outfit in SouthEast Asia, Malaysia to be exact. The design is somewhat exotic in it’s dark floral grunginess.

studio7designs.com

With a 2-tier dropline menu, this site is packed full of design and graphic goodness.

IdioticAdventures.com

Enough of the serious design concepts and cultivating new ideas by exploring the latest technical genre, let’s get to some serious and much needed slacking off via animation video shorts of the headless kind (left-brain vs right-brain vs no-brain)!

Other Noteable and Fun Sites this Week:

http://ui.jquery.com

The jQuery User-Interface widgets, components and interaction scripts, just got a new site, and an updated script library v.1.5b4, as well as many new demos! The new site is hot off-the-wire, I can’t wait to check out the new demos…

http://faub.org

This ranks about a zero on the SEO and accessibility scale, but it’s a fun site concept nonetheless… with some interesting usage of drag n’ drop, transparency and a combo box navigation. Some image replacement techniques could have provided at least a minutia of content that the search engines could have indexed. As an experimental novelty site with a visual navigation, it’s really very clever.

It turns out the DOM Drag & Drop script is available from Dynamic Drive, check it out here. Please use sparingly.

The Weekly Top Standards question of the week…
How Bloggy is your Blog?

Acronym of the week:
FOSS - Free and open source software

If you’re not interested in your website’s visitors, here are 7 things you can do to make this clear to them.

1. Provide Them with No Way to Contact You

Some of your visitors may want to contact you to ask a question, make a suggestion, or just to send a comment your way. If your site offers no way for them to contact you, you’re telling them that their feedback isn’t significant. Most websites will provide a simple contact for or an email address to allow visitors to write to them, and most businesses will provide a phone number on their website. Giving your contact information will help visitors to feel that you are trustworthy and legitimate.

2. Give a Poor Description of Your Products and Services

Your website is your opportunity to provide visitors with the features and benefits of your products and services, and to let them know why they should choose you. If visitors have to search around the site to try to find complete information, or if the description of your products and services is inadequate, your website will not be effective.

3. Don’t Follow Up on Their Comments and Inquiries

When visitors leave comments on your website/blog or when they email you, a response is needed in most cases. If hey are expecting or hoping for follow up, they will feel that you don’t value their feedback if you do not respond in some way.

4. Use Pop Ups and/or Pop Unders

Pop ups and pop unders are two of the most annoying things on the internet. Fortunately, many browsers now offer options for blocking them, however, they can still be annoying to visitors. Yes, pop ups and pop unders can be effective for some people in the right circumstances, but today most internet users are going to ignore them and they will do more harm than good. If you are considering using them, be sure that you are weighing the pros and cons and be aware of the message that they can send to visitors.

5. Use Contextual Ads

Contextual ads (linked within the text of a page) are generally considered to be annoying by most visitors, including me. They typically will convert pretty poorly, which means you won’t make much money with them, and they will turn off a lot of visitors.

6. Display Excessive of Flashy Advertisements

Many websites and blogs earn money through advertisements, and it has become generally accepted by most internet users. However, if the advertisements are excessive they will change from being accepted to being annoying. By plastering ads in every conceivable location you will be sending a message to your visitors that you place more importance if making a little bit more money than you do in satisfying your visitors. If you want visitors to feel that they are your number one priority, keep ads to a reasonable limit.

In addition to the amount of advertisements that you use, the type of ads you use is also important. Many banner ads can be distracting to your visitors. Ideally, banner ads should be still, or at least involve only minimal movement. Flashy banners that quickly change colors or show a lot of moving text or objects can be extremely distracting, and visitors will wind up leaving.

7. Don’t Provide Them with an Accessible Website

Nothing shows visitors that you don’t care about them like not even allowing them to use your site. Have you ever visited a site that told you to upgrade or install something in order to be able to use the site? I think we all have. These websites present a serious negative message to visitors that don’t fit into a specific box.

What’s Your Opinion?

What would you add to this list? As a designer, what do you try to prevent sending the wrong message to visitors? As a visitor, what shows you that a website owner doesn’t value you?

Cheb.com.au

Cheb 2.0.1 was redesigned April 13th, a web design geek blog. Cheb Dagher is the blogs owner, in Sydney, Australia. The site is built using WordPress.

AuthenticStyle.co.uk

A sliding scroll page type of navigation, works pretty well, when the page slides to it’s new position, another identical menu appears in the same position as before to make it easy to use.

Fantesca.com

Fantesca: Winery and Estate, Napa Valley - St. Helena, CA, an exquisite site.

MoxieGlobal.com.au

EarlyInterventionSupport.com

A new twist on some standard design concepts, done with some freeform illustration and mixed-media visual styling.

TheNorik.com

I’m usually not a big fan of portfolio sites who place long lists of their work directly on the homepage, such that it requires huge amounts of scrolling, but this two-page site makes it work. There is a certain elegance in the simplicity. Twelve portfolio pieces are shown at TheNorik, and those pop open in a light box setup. The lightbox setup uses a certain amount of style, and not the default chrome navigation elements, so that it is completely fitting in the design. The portfolio pieces themselves are not lacking in any skills either, showing some refined talent and inspiration. Overall, everything is very tastefully done…

DesignIntellection.com

Finally, a more or less plain vanilla web standards site in the minimalist vein that strikes my fancy.

DennaJones.com

This site has a treasure trove of API usage documented here by the happy merchants. Awesome stuff gang, the phrase “happy merchant” reminds me of Leslie Camacho’s EE forum’s signature quote, more aptly an African proverb: “I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand… “. Although actually I could of swore the forum signature was, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Anyways… back to some more websites!

LarvaLabs.com

A New York based software company focused on mobile entertainment application goodies for the T-Mobile Sidekick platform.

DevKick.com

A web dev designer community site made by notable designer/developer Monc’s David Hellsing, who has been a particular friend of the open source community, developing Stylegala originally, the Tripoli CSS framework, and more goodies. DevKick is still a work in progress, but it’s really starting to shape up into a powerhouse resource for web designers.

Other notable resources and fun sites this week:

NetTuts.com

Brought to you by the same people who run PSDtuts. Here’s a link to the Launch Announcement at NetTuts.com.

There is getting to be some great tutorial sites out there for web-dev’ers, with so much out there to learn in this changing field, these make a great addition to your RSS daily feed reads.

ErguvanPlatin.com

An all flash realty development website, with a fabulous splash of colors just to brighten your day, and inspire you to create something colorful!

BestWebGallery.com

If you enjoy viewing a flash site now and then keep an eye on Best Web Gallery, they make some great gallery picks, also some CSS/Web Standards sites. This site created by Nick La of WebDesignerWall.com, another don’t miss site in itself. I’ve got a feeling most of you will be no strangers to Nick’s work.

• Way out in left field check out the Chinese Proverbs vs. the African Proverbs wiki pages for some philosophic thoughts, more great quotes, and in-depth inspiration.

• Until next time, don’t forget to kick up your boots, or would that be ReBoots?
– Don’t miss the next web standards reboot this May 1st ‘08, and be kind to your fellow designers.

As May 1st approaches I wanted to give everyone a reminder to get their sites redesigned and give them a Standards Reboot.

You don’t have to wait until May 1st to get your site rebooted, but be sure to add your pre and post thumbnails as soon as your done, so your site appears in the reboot gallery.

IntuitiveDesigns.net

From the typography choices to the fabulous illustration work, this is one classy site! A husband and wife team, namely Koldo Barroso (graphic designer) and Naomi Niles (coder), are producing some fine works from their home base of Madrid, Spain.

freshAIRapps.com

Showcase, tutorials and resources for Adobe AIR. A bit of progressive enhancement ruffles the feathers of some, if you load the design in IE6 you may see a box around the logo, and no clouds in the background. IE6 users would be better off keeping their feet firmly planted on the ground anyways. This brings up a subject for another post… did everyone see Smashing Magazine’s ”Getting Creative w/ Transparency”, post this past week? Great stuff!!

RyJennings.com

An interesting 1-page portfolio concept, with some unusual navigation choices, utilizing the Script.aculo.us js library and a lightbox scheme. Clicking the small text link, “View all Screens” (upper right) loads two panels that have links to more portfolio screenshots, and turns off the panels fading slideshow. A problem with many such slideshow elements is the height must be defined, which does not allow for resizing the text. The famous “Panic Coda - Slider Nav” seems to have found a work around for this flaw.

10voltMedia.com

The vector illustrated Cityscape on the homepage, evidently represents the Chicago skyline. A fair amount of javascript handywork, and the clean color palette make this site a fresh pick! For more real-life skylines, check Mubs’ recent MI blog post, Inspiring Cityscapes for some breath-taking photo renderings.

ChemistryRecruitment.com

A clever mix of html, flash and javascript goodness. There is more functionality here than meets the eye, the site was featured on Smashing Mag’s “Web Form Design: Modern Solutions and Creative Ideas“.

RedBlu.com

Can we as web standards professionals appreciate an all flash site? I don’t have a problem showing this site some love. It’s really a wonderful navigation within. There are times I think, when we might all like to do some flash design. The typography is also quite nice, with the fat slab serif font somewhat resembling Big Mummy by Manfred Klein.

SprintBio.com

Green earth themes are easy to like, when they are not trying to scare you into submission of changing your carbon generating ways by showing the global warming color scheme. The green earth scheme is much more pleasant, blues and greens and peaceful springtime, ahhh bliss. It’s hard to do a theme design like this and not have it look like it was inspired by another site. Take the Viget/Extend web dev blog, it looks a little reminiscent of Taproot Creative if only because the concept is very similar.

HomeDesignFind.com

Home Design Find (HDF) is a web magazine/blog for home design products and ideas.

A nice blog of modern architectural subjects and interior design products, built on WordPress with a blue theme, crinkled paper and transparent tape elements. Many of the Most Gallery sites are predominantly blue palettes this week, just luck of the draw this time around.

Grooveshark.com

A new to me music community, with a clean layout and unique set of features, that looks well worth checking out. For any entrepreneurs in the crowd this enterprise looks like a good study, as it’s a strange mix or “feeding frenzy” as it’s known at Grooveshark, of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing and revenue models, where artists do get paid. My current favorite streaming music website is Slacker, where it is very easy to build your own free personal station(s) from a mix of artists and exploring related artists.

HenryHoffman.com

Succumbing to the “Purple People Eater” this week, this overpowering light-on-dark purple design is simply too powerful to ignore any longer. Looks like a great web design blog too, nice job Henry. Mr. HH can be found kicking it over at the MODx forums.

Following on from our previous post of Inspiring CMS Showoffs I thought I’d compile a list of Web Development Framework showcases.

There are a lot of web development frameworks, but the most established ones you can count on the fingers of one hand, maybe two.

Ruby On Rails

www.rubyonrails.org
Language: Ruby

Ruby on Rails is the hugely popular framework from 37signals, that powers there many web applications, and made open source.

Also: http://www.rubyonrails.org/applications

CakePHP

www.cakephp.org
Language: PHP

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications.

Camping

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/camping/
Language: Ruby

Camping is a microframework for web development, by whytheluckystuff, is insanely small and incredibly powerful.

Symphony

www.symfony-project.org
Language: PHP

Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster.

Although I couldn’t find a dedicated showcase, the weekly blog update usually contains a few newly launched Symphony powered sites.

CodeIgniter

codeigniter.com
Language: PHP

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.

Prado

www.pradosoft.com
Language: PHP

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5.

Django

www.djangoproject.com
Language: Python

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

There are a number of other frameworks (Fusebox, Spring, Turbo Gears to name a few) that I would have liked to include in the list but I was unable to find showcases for them. If you know of some, please let me know and I’ll update the list.

Pricing is a dilemma that faces all web designers (and other service professionals) at one time or another. There are a number of decisions that need to be made regarding pricing, and one of the most common involves offering fixed prices for different types of projects or providing quotes for each individual project. If you look around at various web designers you’ll see a bit of both, although you will probably see more that do quotes. In this article I would like to take a look at some of the benefits to each pricing strategy. There is no right or wrong method, but you should consider these factors before deciding on your strategy.

The Pros of Offering Set Prices

1. Less time is spent with potential customers that don’t result in any business. Quotes can take a good bit of time and if a high percentage of your quotes are not generating work, you could be wasting valuable time. It should also be said that any designer offering set prices should allow themselves the flexibility to up the price if it doesn’t fit into a specific box.

2. Potential customers like to see prices. Seeing prices can put customers at ease as they will have a much better idea what a design from you will cost. They may be hesitant to contact a bunch of potential designers for quotes, and finding a designer with set prices that they consider reasonable may encourage them to not even seek quotes from others.

Comparing the price of one designer to another is more feasible with set pricing (although a negative is that some customers tend to decide based on the lowest price rather than factoring quality into the decision). In general, I think most potential customers prefer to see set prices.

3. You may get more interest with set prices. Most people would rather contact a designer knowing at least the range of the price, as opposed to contacting a designer for a quote not having an idea what the price will be. This will not always be the case, but from my experience set prices will often generate more interest. On the down side, designers that offer low set prices will get inquiries from a lot of tire kickers that never wind up taking any action.

4. More consistency in prices. Providing a quote for each individual project can sometimes lead to a great deal of variation in prices. This can be a good thing for designers when they are able to make more money, but generally consistency and stability is more desirable. With set prices you will avoid quoting too low out of fear that the customer will go somewhere else. As a result, you won’t wind up doing work for less than you should.

The Pros of Using Price Quotes

1. More flexibility. Each project is unique and set prices really don’t account for this. Providing price quotes will help you to price jobs according to their individual requirements and demands. It should be noted that even with a strategy of offering quotes you will still find yourself dealing with surprises and you’ll still have the possibility of being in a bad situation price wise.

2. Increasing your prices is not so noticeable. Over time as you gain experience and become a better designer you will most likely want to raise your prices. With a set pricing plan these increase can be pretty obvious to customers and potential customers, but with price quotes it is not nearly so noticeable.

3. Allows you to overprice jobs that are not a good fit. From time-to-time you’ll get some potential projects that really aren’t the best fit for you. With price quotes you can simply quote a job higher than you normally would. In most cases, the customer will wind up going with another designer, but if they do choose you, at least you’ll make more off of the job than you would have otherwise.

4. You can get a foot in the door with a potential customer. When providing price quotes there is a bit more selling involved. If you website displays set prices, either a customer wants that price or they don’t. With price quotes you may get a better chance to talk to potential customers and sell them on your service.

Conclusion

Most designers prefer using price quotes rather than set prices because it allows them to treat each job individually, and since no two jobs are the same, this is important to a lot of designers. Of those who offer set pricing packages, most are lower-priced designers that tend to work on less complicated projects. As you move into bigger and more complex projects, set prices become less feasible.

What are your thoughts on pricing? Which strategy do you use, and why?