How much do you charge for design work?

My standard billing rate for design work is $85/hour. This rate is applied to all work that is considered "forward progress" toward a finished product. In instances where I feel like I have spent time on a project that did not contribute to the final product, the client will not be charged for that time.

Why do you charge by the hour versus a fixed cost for designs?

Costs can vary greatly depending on the client and the type of project. Based on this, I have decided to charge an hourly rate for all work, rather than a fixed price for each service. I believe this is the most economically fair approach for both my clients and myself. It also allows me to accomodate a broader range of clients from those who need simple designs to those who need more complex and time-intensive designs and applications.

Can you work within a specified budget on a project?

Yes, if you have a specified budget to work with, I will try to accommodate any reasonable offers.

When will I be billed?

For projects spanning less than one month, an invoice will be mailed out upon completion of a project. Payment is due one month from the date of the invoice.

For projects spanning more than one month, monthly invoices will be sent out at the beginning of each month. Payment on each invoice is due one month from the date of the invoice.

All of my billing is handled by GTP Designs' partner company, New River Computing. All invoices will be sent from and payable to New River Computing.

How much would it cost for you to design a website for me?

This is probably the most common question I am asked by new clients. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most difficult to answer without a clear idea of exactly what the client wants and needs.

The cost of a website can range from a hundreds of dollars to millions of dollars, depending on the site and what it entails. Consider shopping for a website to be like shopping for a car. If someone were to walk up to a car dealer and ask, "how much does a car cost?" the car dealer would need to know what kind of car the person was looking to buy before he/she could start quoting relevant prices to the customer. In that same respect, before I can give an estimate on a how much a website is going to cost, I need to discuss with the potential client exactly what it is that they hope to achieve with the website.

Is there anything I can do to decrease the cost and turnaround time for my website?

As a matter of fact, there are a few things that can cut down on turnaround time and cost.

Having a clear idea of what you want to get out of your website and what kind of content you want to appear on your site before attempting to start the design process can make a big difference. When someone comes to me and says, "I want a website," but has put no thought into what he/she wants out of the site, it makes design process extremely difficult.

One of the biggest hold-ups that I see in terms of turnaround time for non-CMS sites (sites in which the client does not directly update the site) is a lack of client-provided content for a website. I can put together a user-friendly and visually appealing site, be ready to go, but without the content from the client, the website is pretty much worthless.

Another big time-consumer for me is editing and enhancing client provided photos for a website. It typically takes far less time to take a good picture, than it does to attempt to make a poorly shot photo look presentable for a website. Obviously, there are exceptions to this. If you happen to snap a blurry photo of Bigfoot and really want to put it up on your site, then I'd be happy to spend the time making the photo presentable. However, if you send me blurry, underexposed product photos. It's probably not in your best interest, from an economic standpoint, for me to spend a couple of hours trying to clean up the photos, when they could just be retaken.

Along the same lines, another thing that I encounter frequently involves client supplied images that are intended to placed into an area with fixed dimensions (for example, a header banner image, or an image slide show), but the images do not conform to a similar aspect ratio of the areas where they are intended to be place . If a space that is intended for a landscape image (one that is wider than it is tall) and I am supplied with a portrait image (one that is taller than it is wide), I'm likely going to have to recreate the background of the photo in order to fit it into the available space, which can be very time consuming.

I've seen other companies that offer to build me a website for $200. Why don't you do that?

The short answer is that you get what you pay for, but there's really more to it than that. Every site that I build is "hand-coded" and started from the ground up. I do not use templates that can result in what I consider to be "cookie cutter" websites. Often times, these mass-produced site designs are also a big mess when you start looking at the site's source files, which means that if you ever decide to modify or update your site, it is probably going to be an arduous task for the person who has to deal with the existing markup.

That being said, there is clearly a market for these kinds of "designs," and if a quick and easy, low-cost website is what somebody is looking for, a company that offers $200 sites might very well be a better choice, in those cases.

I am not in the market of mass-producing websites nor trying to make a quick buck off of repeatedly selling the same site design with a few minor aesthetic changes here and there. My target website clients are those who are looking for a custom-designed website built around their unique identity and needs.

How much does a logo cost?

Logo design is a little bit easier to give an estimate on than website, but there is still no magic price for a logo. Depending upon the complexity of the artwork involved and the time put it into the design, the cost of logos can vary dramatically.

Typically, most of the logos that I have worked on have fallen into the $250-$500 range.

Can you create a sample logo for free, and then I'll decide if I want to pay for it or not?

Unfortunately, no. If I were to just throw something together for a client for sample purposes, I don't think it would appropriately reflect the final product, so I would likely end up spending the same amount of time on a "sample" that I would spend on a final product. I'm not saying that I've actually done this before, but I might have.