Welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple! I’m Holly Christie, and today I’m exploring a question I get asked all the time by fellow web designers and developers: should you put your pricing on your website, even if every project you do is completely bespoke?

In this episode, I’m sharing my thoughts on this contentious topic.

I’ll walk you through how I've addressed issues like this to build a successful business.

If you’re wondering how to confidently showcase your pricing online in a way that feels right for you and your business, you’re in the right place.

Click play and let’s get started!

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First of all, it builds trust. So many website

designers, and particularly developers are missing out on

work. You know, ultimately people buy from people

and we always need to remember that. In today's episode we

are going to discuss how to put pricing on your website

when your pricing is bespoke and suited to each individual

project.

Hi, I'm Holly Christie, I'm from Websites Made simple and

I am here to support you if you're a website designer, website

developer in having a business you absolutely

love. Ready to go, let's get started.

So today I'm going to talk about pricing on websites because

so many clients say to me, should I have my pricing on my website?

Now you're an experienced or just starting out website developer,

hopefully you're going to know that the answer here is going to be yes, you

need to have pricing on the website. First of all, it builds trust. It's

about transparency. They can see your pricing and

immediately they can pre qualify themselves

as to whether they're going to want to work with you or not.

As long as you've got a really good, really strong, really engaging

website with a good portfolio. Do not worry about putting

your prices on your website, even if those prices are high.

Don't worry about can be hard if you are

creating your pricing and I hear you my pricing

also custom. I do have my own simply sites

where there are their lower budget websites and you just choose the

site that's right for you and that is what you pay for it. But when

it comes to custom, as you'll know, there's just so many deciding

factors in it. It can be how many pages the website build

is, how complicated the tech is going to be that you're

also working about incorporating certain design elements, whether you're

sourcing those elements for the client or whether they're coming through from a

designer tech like whether they're having memberships. You know,

there's so many things that influence it and I'm actually one

for saying yeah, you should be customizing your pricing like

this. And actually I left one off which is

and actually I left one off which is how much of a pain the

client's going to be if you have a client who's going to want to have

a lot of meetings and they generally want a

lot of face to face time which is most web designers nightmare,

including mine. I have set terms in

my contract that says how many meetings people get with me, it talks about my

process, it tells them that they will hear from me a lot, they'll get video

recordings, they'll get all that sort of thing. But if they want

face to face time with me beyond the initial call and

an initial meeting, they then need to pay for it. And you'd be

really surprised how many people choose that. They actually don't need to

meet when they've got a charge of £130.

If I feel that from that initial call that someone's going to want

some more hand holding, I might actually just build that into the

price of the website as well. One of the reasons

that I don't go for kind of flat across the board

pricing, say, you know, all websites are £4,000 or

all membership sites are £7,500.

I get that that's really reassuring to the customer.

However, if I said that there's a baseline of

all custom build websites are £4,000,

regardless whether you have a five page website or a ten page website,

for example, that's like, well, happy days to the

five page websites that we're building because we're being paid double what we

are for the 10 page website. But it doesn't really work like that

and the customer shouldn't have to pay that buffer. I

mean, when we're working out the pricing, it's not just the cost of the

website, it's not just the cost per page, although that does come into it.

It's the cost of our skills, our learning, the

marketing we have to do in the background. The fact that we don't get paid

holidays because we're not employees yet, we put all of that together

in a package. So it's not surprising that our

pricing is bespoke, that we think, oh yeah, this is

going to be a quick little five pager, as opposed to a five pager

that may be full of really complex stuff. And I know that there

are a lot of coaches that say everything should be the same price. You should

know the price of your offering. Boom, boom, boom. That works very well for

coaches, it works well for copywriters, it doesn't work well as a model

for website designers. So feel free to

absolutely create your own pricing.

We do need to know how we're going to get that across on the website

in a way that people are going to think, yeah, you know, that's

transparent. I like it. I know whether I can afford to work with this or

not and get in touch as a web designer, you'll know. People

don't just land on a website, think, yes, I want this, I'll buy it. Unless

it is either a very low cost product, like they think Oh, I

need a water bottle. I'll go on Amazon, I'll buy the water bottle or

unless it's something that is so niche and it is an exact match

that they just think, yeah, that's what I need, off I go. You want it

to be memorable because it's a really good representation of

you, whatever that is. You know, we're all different. My websites are about, you know,

sleek, professional, that kind of professional confidence

sort of thing. But I love seeing websites when they're really playful

and they're really vibey and stuff like that. So many

website designers and particularly developers are missing

out on work because they don't have photos of them on their website. They have,

you know, videos of lots of code going across on screen or they've

got big graphics of computers and people don't relate to that.

And people, particularly when it comes to

anything techy and web design can still feel really

overwhelming for some people. They

will just feel immediately overwhelmed. You know, ultimately people

buy from people and we always need to remember that. With your pricing

you can have a prices start from

on your website. You can put it in your frequently asked questions, you can put

it on your website pages. Whatever works for you.

I would say try not to hide it. I would say in

my website it is in my frequently asked questions on the

page relating to the custom build website. But I do

think I'd actually like to make it a little bit more transparent and have it

on the website there. And that's something I'm going to be working on with a

big website update I'm doing soon. But if you're

not sure and your pricing is kind of really bespoke for

each project, then price is starting from here.

You can also have a price range as well. So

websites of up to five pages prices from

this, websites from up to 10 pages prices from that.

Likewise with memberships or things like that, I prefer to have

a kind of a blanket prices from. I think at the

moment it's around about the 3,000 pound mark. Then I also have

in the frequently asked Questions the breakdown of

if you would like membership or specific plugins or something

like that that's going to cost extra, the cost of the

plugin plus the setup of it, et cetera, et cetera. But all

of that really gets discussed at the time of

meeting clients to see whether we're the right fit for each other.

Pricing from Feel free absolutely. To group it if you'd like to give

it as a guide because that can be really helpful when you

have people who, let's say you have pricing from

£2,000, but they come to you with something

that's quite complex and actually you want to charge more like six or seven thousand

pounds. They then say to you, well, this is

three times what you've described on your website. I'm not

feeling that there's trust there. So if you're just doing

a lot of the same sites, like some web developers and designers only work on

e commerce sites, they'll have their own pricing structure for that.

Some only do brochure sites. I actually do both e

commerce and brochure, but I prefer working on brochure sites as well.

And so really make it clear to your clients. And you can also

have, if you like, and obviously we're developers, we can code these

things, an estimated pricing calculator. You can do it where

it says, what type of website are you looking for? Are you a service based

business, Are you a product based business? And they can check, are you looking

to have a membership? Are you looking to have this, are you looking to have

that? You can then have it displaying,

say we estimate website would be

in the region of this much, pop your details in

here and you know, or book a chat with us and you can make it

clear that it is only an estimate but it gives them something

straight away which often lots of other website designers won't

be giving out. Yeah, it's real transparency and you're going to get that

engagement. Because people always like to know how much things cost. The fact that

you've made it easy for them with like a pricing

calculator is also a little bit impressive for people.

So it gives them that pull and it makes them think, ah, their

prices might be high but look at what they're offering, look at what they've got

on their own website. So don't be afraid of doing that. Another

thing that you can do is you should have a portfolio on your website.

And people will often get more of a vibe just from going through

your website than they will on your portfolio. But it's really important

you have them. And I also have, when I send out quotes to

people, once I've spoken to them on Zoom, I

will then send them a link to my portfolio. I'll send them a link to

my Google Reviews as well. And something you could look at as well

is within your portfolio. You could have this website

cost this much. This website was from

this package. So you know the package

1, 2000-4000 pounds or something like that. So people can

actually see what real Time

prices get by seeing what you're building,

not just your own website, but what you're building for other people as well.

If you do it that way, it's really important to put a date on there

as well because pricing obviously does change as everything

kind of goes up and your skill set deepens as well. So for

example, I don't have a constant portfolio

of like all the work I've done because I've done hundreds of websites and you

know, some of them date back like 10 years, so it just wouldn't be relevant

now. So I tried to keep quite a limited portfolio on my

website from the last couple of years. And Ima put

this website was built in 2023 or was published in

2023. Price Band A and you can

link that price band, you can pop it and see toggle

so that when you click on it it says price band a. Websites of

£2,000 to £4,000, something like that. Click here to inquire about

one of these. Never leave that opportunity on the

table. Always get in touch about your prices.

I would love to hear your stories about pricing. I think

we've all got some of them where we've had a

client who's just suddenly been really unexpected with one of the prices. Or

have you had the pricing where you go in there and you think, oh

yeah, I priced this really high only to not get the project because

they think you're too cheap. Remember, things are so

subjective. I did a website and it was

for some people who were doing startup

and I wanted to learn Shopify at the time and

I identified that Shopify would be a really good match for them.

So I quoted them and they said, you know, it's a startup, we don't want

to spend too much money on that, all that sort of stuff. So I thought,

well, I'll quite low because I'm learning at the same time and it's giving me

that opportunity. So I've got to say this was about six years ago, something like

that. And I thought, okay, well I'm going to quote it at like

£800 or something like that. So when I did, the

woman then said, oh, my husband's going to pay this, can you forward it to

this email address? And she sent through their physical address for the invoice

as well. And the husband was a partner in an

estate agent that was, you know, one of the top leading performing estate

agents in the country, you know, that had a very, very high turnover. So I

could have actually doubled that invoice. They most likely

still would have paid it because they wanted to work with me as well. So

as much as they had said, they just wanted to invest a little bit

into this startup, what was a little bit to them was

very different to what is a little bit to me. So do bear

that in mind. Be confident in your pricing. Know what's going into

your pricing. One final piece of advice, if you go to my

website, thisdemandinglife.com go to the blog, you will see

I've got several articles there of what a website pricing is

made up of. And when I send out quotes to

clients, don't send quotes as PDFs with this, with that.

No one's got time for that, especially if you're going up against other web designers.

I have a really robust kind of zoom call with them. Those calls

are free. And then I will send them an email with everything

we've discussed. I will send a link to my portfolio, I send them a link

to my Google reviews and I sometimes send them links to

blog articles of how to choose the right designer or

developer for your website, how to

identify that it's time for a website redesign

or rebuild, and how to prepare for that. So it's stuff like make

sure you've got a copywriter, have you got a branding sheet, booked, all that sort

of stuff. And a lot of time people come back to me and they say,

yeah, we loved how robust this process was. We loved that you had

covered everything. So if you are going to go out

there, put your prices on your website, own it. And

if you think that you would like to break it down for your clients as

well, absolutely do. Pop it into a blog post, send them link to it.

That's all from me today. Let me know how you are

getting on with your website pricing. You can find me at

websitesmadesimple.co.uk, or you can find me on LinkedIn

@hollycchristie. Until next time.