How to charge your clients with Joomla Web Designs

Posted by Luis Posselt in Learn Joomla

Learning to charge in the right way it is always essential for any business, and Joomla businesses are not the exception. Planning your prices from the beginning will help you get more clients and reduce the margin of losing future ones.

You know Joomla is a CMS system that lets you develop Websites in an easy way. If you already know Joomla, let me ask you this.  Do you tell people that you can build websites for them where they can update things by themselves?  If you do, do you offer them a price that normally applies to regular HTML/CSS websites? Or how much do you charge? Well if you are charging even $400 for a 5 page Website in Joomla and then people is coming back to you with questions about the system functionality without charging them, you are doing everything in the wrong way. If you don’t setup prices from the beginning, people will take for granted that the initial price includes everything. Now, I will respect whatever reason, opinion or idea you have behind your business. But for me any time is precious, so it always has a price. When I say price I do not necessarily refer to money.

Now let me show with an example of how this affects your time and probably your health.

Example – Building a Joomla 5 Page Website for $400 dollars.

Let’s image you offer Bryan, your imaginary client, a 5 page website where he can update any page at any time without getting help from the Web Developer Guy, YOU.

Bryan is happy and he goes forward on the project with you. You finish the website and guess what he is very happy with your work. But 3 or 5 days passed away, and you get a call from Bryan because he is trying to change some text, and he is having some problems. You accept to help him because you are a Good Samaritan and for the next 2 hours you stay with him explaining how to understand the process. You finish with him, and happily he finishes telling you thanks. Now the thing here is that you are going to have a 50/50 percent chance that he tells you, how much he owes you for your time, and you will have 50/50 percent chance to answer nothing or else. If the guy is good, you won’t charge him anything. But imagine if the situation is a different one like dealing with a person with no patient or you are the person without patient to explain. This situation puts a different picture, and more over you are not making any money. Believe me this is only a small example while dealing with clients. Sometimes clients are going to demand more from you for the initial price you gave them and some others don’t. If you run into a bad client and you are still charging $400 and the he suddenly starts demanding things that were not included on the price , at least, you are going to get a good headache and you will find yourself in a situation that won’t finish so nicely.

Now, don’t get me wrong in here, I don’t thing clients are hard to deal with, I am just saying that everything on life will have its positive and negative side. So you can have good clients and bad clients and the same thing goes for us, there will be good web designers and bad web designers.

Now you need to see the big picture here, there are going to be situations where you will be able to help organizations and people get on with their struggling lives by helping them with low price websites or offering them your time for free like a consultation in Web Design. That’s good and I have done it before. But you cannot setup cheap prices in any CMS system because there is going to be training involved at some point or another, especially if clients want to update the site by themselves. If you keep doing that my friend, you are not going anywhere on making money in this business.

So if you are wondering now, what is a good way to charge? Ok let me share with you some advice, and I’m going to give you this inside by showing the following table.

In here, you will see 3 different price options to your clients, so they can decide what they want. Moreover, if you offer SEO, PPC, or any Traffic Generator services, you can add extra income to your Web Design services. Before continue, remember this is only an example and you are the ultimate person who decides what is the best thing for you and your customers. People most of the time won’t matter the price as long as they get great services. Excellent and good quality customer service is one key here to convince your clients on the price.

“You are going to be in business for them and because of them.”

Before finish, I will like to add that this is only a way to setup your prices in Joomla. However, there will be a lot of people that handle prices in a different way and it works for them. Always test everything, and always follow your inner feelings and what best fits your needs. If you have any suggestions, comments, or any opinions, don’t forget to comment and share with us your ideas.

Tags: Joomla 1.5, Joomla 1.6, Joomla Web Design, Make Money, Website Prices