Getting to the finish line
How much will this cost?
Website development rates vary so widely it will leave you frustrated and confused. Many developers do not publish their rates and even less detail how the final number is calculated. It saves me and you valuable time to put this out from the start. Just getting a complete understanding of the requirements to give you a quote is time consuming for everyone involved, but the most critical.
My hourly rate is $60 per hour. In most cases you’ll have a set price and a comprehensive scope of work before we start. I’ll outline exactly how I get there. You can skip to the end for the details.
Your Budget
This is the most awkward part of the development process. There are very few industries that would require a budget before giving a quote. If I was asking for someone to build me something or fix something and they asked what my budget was up front it might be the end of the conversation. Normally the prospective client will give a lower number (I would) and the sales dance begins.
The developer either gives a reasonable scope of work for the budget which probably lacks in features to meet the clients budget. More than likely the developer promises the sun and the moon all within the clients budget in order to win the contract. The later is more dangerous and will always end poorly.
A simple example
You have a widget that you’d like to sell on-line. You have three variations of this widget. There are two additional features that can be added to any of the variations. You have an existing website and for the sake of argument the existing website is perfect in design and code, nothing additional is needed.
The under $500 budget
In all fairness you probably don’t need me for this, but I’d be happy to help if needed. This can be accomplished by putting up a Buy Now button on your website that will take the user through a PayPal checkout. You would need a product description and SKU number for each possible variation and option for your widget.
Yep its clunky, not so user friendly and won’t look as professional as your competition. You’ll be doing allot of cutting and pasting to coordinate shipping and invoicing. However, your now taking on-line orders for your widget and within your budget.
The over $5000 budget
A larger budget means more bells and whistles, more automation to achieve the same end. Now you have a custom shopping cart that allows multiple items and options to be added to the order. Each widget has its own super cool slide show with large pictures and a product description that can be modified by you at any time. Shipping is calculated prior to checkout.
The customer receives a custom pdf invoice after the transaction is completed. Your shipping center gets an email with a packing list. The transaction information and customer is added to a third party accounting system like Freshbooks. Your sales team gets an update to their CRM (customer relations management) with pertinent follow up information like Highrise.
When the shipping center sends out the package they can click on a link in the email that delivered the packing list which will take them to a form to input the tracking number on your site. After the tracking number is submitted the customer gets an email with the tracking number and a link to the UPS or USPS site to follow the shipping status. Two weeks later your customer gets a short feedback form. All done without you touching a thing.
The possibilities are endless. A larger budget means you could have a site with full PCI compliance that allows you take credit cards without using a payment gateway or sales chat tools.
Scope Of Work
Now that I have an idea on your budget and a vague understanding of what your looking for we can dig into the details. We’ll look at your competition, sites you like and especially sites you don’t like. I’ll dig into your business procedures and figure out what you need and what you want. Go back and read the last 9 words of the previous sentence, there are probably some cost savers in the difference between wants and needs that your not aware of. I’ll find them.
Your expectations on the solutions that I use will effect the bottom line. I’ve found the more preconceptions of exactly what has to happen and the tools used to get there will generally increase the production time. Maybe you have a specific shopping cart solution you want to use. I might have a solution that requires significantly less overhead that achieves the same results. Keep your options open and let me know what tools you’ve looked at.
The scope of work will outline the deliverables to you. I use the scope of work to determine how many hours it will take to deliver a finished product and the production time.
Production time is also an exercise in fuzzy math. Production time includes turnaround on approvals from you, revisions, phone calls, emails among other things. 8 hours of development can easily equal a full week to a finished product.
The bottom line is you will know exactly how much it will cost and how long it will take before we begin working.
This is the most critical detail of your project. I could write far more than you want to read on this topic alone.
Milestones
Larger projects will have milestones. The whole purpose of milestones are to match up the scope of work with what we’re actually doing. Milestones will be our roadmap the finished product.
The scope of work, milestones, materials I need from you, approvals and anything associated with your project will available on-line through Basecamp. Basecamp is a life saver when it comes to project management. It allows me to communicate with multiple team members and gives us a record of where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Can you lower the price?
We’ve gone over your project and I’ve delivered the scope of work and final costs. Its just too close to your upper limit. That’s not a problem. We’ll take a look and see what features we can remove or downgrade to get you into a comfortable price range.
What if it takes you half the time you quoted?
Legitimate question. In this case I’ll go out and buy myself something nice and celebrate because it would be a first for me.
In all seriousness this never happens on my contracts, ever. I’ll tell you a secret that most developers won’t talk about but almost all do in some way. When developers start on something new our minds explode with all sorts of ideas on how to make the end product better. Admittedly some ideas are better than others. The more time we have the more we’ll give you in functionality and scalability. 9 times out of 10 the time will creep up on us and we’ll finish up the extra bells and whistles then shift back to the exact functionality outlined in the scope of work.
Developers love coming up with cool solutions. Being just a code monkey in a code writing sweatshop is miserable. We’ll flex our code slinging skills as far as we can.
I’ve literally never given a client the first look at a product with a significant amount of production time in my favor. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, how the revisions are handled will be a good gauge of how well the project was estimated. Your far more likely to hear, “That’s outside the scope of work” during revisions if I’ve gone way over my estimated time.
What if takes you more time than you quoted?
Sucks to be me. Wouldn’t be the first time. If your on a fixed price contract the final price is final. I can’t imagine I would be very pleased if I had my bathroom refinished and the contractor asked for more money once it was done.
Whenever possible I like to work with fixed price. Normally I require 50% of the total cost up front with the final 50% once I’ve got your final approval. With larger projects we can break it up into smaller payments.
There are a couple exceptions to the fixed price model. In these circumstances its the regular hourly rate until we’re done.
- Server administrations for email, security issues, performance issues etc.
- Prexisting Code – Its kinda like having a pre-existing condition, except the government doesn’t regulate web development yet. Once I’m comfortable that whatever was left before me isn’t going to explode we can move to fixed price model. Something that should take 15 minutes can turn into 6 hours pretty quickly if the last programmer was having a bad day.
- Work outside the original scope
At this point you’ve read about 1500 words on my approach to the admin side of development.
You deserve a beer or a nap.