Creating price estimates
When we talk about price, it’s important to have some context. There are a few things that we need to remember.
- Excellent service seems expensive, but isn’t. Jumping when you call, doing work you ask for, delivering projects on time and in general being around takes time – lots of it – and costs money. The alternative is usually more expensive in the long run, of course.
- We insist on providing excellent service. We can’t not provide excellent service. We just aren’t set up for it.
- Good design also seems expensive. As we’ve grown over the last several years, I’m noticed a definite increase in the quality of design as larger numbers of designers work on it. (This isn’t design by committee, but that’s another article.) Of course, as more people work on it, more hours are spent on it.
- As a design firm, we must focus on constantly improving our design work.
- Modern, standard-compliant front-end coding is also expensive – at least relative to throwing together a site in Dreamweaver. Again, the long-term savings are high.
A couple more things:
- We estimate price using days and half days, not hours. To do good work, you have to concentrate on a project; you can’t shoehorn it in around other things.
- We estimate how long we really think it’ll take, then estimate how complicated the project or client is, and use that to apply a multiplier to the estimate.
- We know that there will be changes – or unforeseen or unarticulated requirements – in the project. We try to build that into the price estimate, but it can be very difficult.