How do you make money doing web design? Or rather, why are businesses not prepared to pay vast sums for quality work?

The answer is complex:

1. Web design is seen as a ‘black art’ to some, so they don’t know what their expectations are. Because of this, they don’t know how much they should pay. But, they know that Harry down the road does a bit of web design, and that guy that advertises in the local newspaper does websites for £100 a pop.
2. Everyone can buy web design software. From about $30 upwards. Because of 1. above, this means that everyone is a fully qualified web designer. So why pay more than Harry or that guy charges? It’s just like desktop publishing in the 1980s.

So, it seems the way forward is to price in accordance with your view of the quality of your work. See Joel On Software’s rather sane view of pricing. We’ve not applied it to our business yet, but I’m thinking seriously about it. Why? Because quality websites take time and at present we’ve got a lot of web design work on that won’t bring in that much money in.

Our favourite web application at the moment is Basecamp. Actually, Basecamp is probably the finest web application I’ve seen. It certainly makes me aspire to creating something like this for our future clients. It’s the first time I’ve looked up to another web design company in six years!

So, what do 37signals (who wrote and manage Basecamp) charge for their work? (We charge around £70 a page, plus pro-rata work for specific application requirements). Here goes:

• $2,500 for a one page redesign
• $7,500 for minor changes to an existing site
• $10,000+ for a redesign
• $15,000+ for a new site

Hmm.. it’s rather a lot, isn’t it? It’s also worth noting this is really just for the user interface (as that’s what 37signals specialise in). The back-end stuff costs extra. Let me consider this further:

The most interesting thing I’ve read about 37signals is their believe that, so far as the web is concerned, the screen is the application. I’ve often specified complex web applications in this way, but at the end of the day thrown it altogether as a boring old document, perhaps with a few mock-up screen shots.

One of the web applications I’m writing at the moment would normally have a specification. This time (and coincidentally about the same time we discovered Basecamp), it hasn’t. I have instead been intensely thinking about the screen. What each page will look like, how it will work, and the flow between pages. I’ve kept a consistent look to each page, buttons, tables etc. using CSS to a greater extent than usual (thanks to these guys for that inspiration).

It will still bring us peanuts, because our pricing still remains competitive, but perhaps there’s a clue as to where we go next. I’ve decided that we do need to give our clients the best but we need to attract the right sort of clients. Those that are prepared to pay for the best and know when they’ve got it.