What are you paying a Web Designer for?
A web developer / web designer is your go-to professional when you need a website. So what are you actually paying for?
You are paying for knowledge and experience
A good designer has gained skills and knowledge over many years of experience. During their career they will also have completed courses and workshops in: design, typography, graphic design, user experience, and will have an extensive network of other developers and open source experts to draw from if they need assistance with a problem.
They improve their knowledge and take new courses to keep up to date with the latest web trends, in what is the most rapidly changing industry. Web designers basically have to forgo many standards every 5 years in order to stay on top. Imagine a doctor whose degree would be redundant 5 years later…
It is a complicated field that not everyone can work in. Web developers are specialized, rare and in high demand, and the best ones also have business solution experience from working in other industries before becoming a web developer.
You are also paying for tangible items and operating costs
A web developers, just like any other professional, have expenses. They need to use expensive equipment, such as computers, additional hardware, software and licences, specific to their work. Eg:
- Office Rent: R5000-10 000+ per month
- Macbook Pro or top end PC Laptop: R25000-60000
- Additional Hardware – R40000+
- Adobe Creative Collection: Photoshop, Illustrator, : R25k+
- Email and internet Line, Data: R2000+ per month
- Servers and hosting: R4000+ per month
- Development tools + Software Licences: R4000-20000+ per month
- Stock content and asset libraries like Shutterstock for images: R3000+ per month
- Student Loans for their training
So what do web designers charge?
The cost of web design work varies. You could ask for quotes from 10 different designers and receive 10 completely different amounts, ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Why is this?
Different Web Designers
Web developers range in skills and experience, some are very specialised in a few key technologies and are incredibly adept and have great insight respectively, you will often hear of backend or frontend only focused developers.
While others are known as full stack developers and are fairly competent in both frontend and backend areas of website development.
A developer with a very niche and specialized skillset can charge up to R3000 an hour while a general full stack developer can be as low as R300 per hour.
Different websites
Every website is unique. This means different requirements and different amounts of time to build each website. There are also many different avenues to achieve your website goals. Thus you also have different programming languages and platforms all which come with their own pros and cons.
A Joomla web developer is perfect for getting a content website up and running for a blog, small business, online store or portfolio site.
However if you’re wanting to build a social media platform or functional website with custom and unique capabilities, you’ll want a Ruby on Rails or Django developer.
This can vary the price incredibly eg:
- A good Joomla designer will charge R450-750 per hour
- A good Rails developer could charge R500-R2000 per hour
So while a very talented web developer could charge R3000 an hour, its unlikely they’ll get that rate in South Africa. They would normally get those rates when hired by US or UK clients, but locally you can expect very talented developers to charge much less.
South Africa has very talented web developers, graphic designers and hardcore programmers, and due to the exchange rate of the Rand vs the Dollar, SA is growing as one of the more popular outsourcing destinations.
You can also expect developers to charge less per hour on project rates, as freelancers are willing to be paid less per hour, if guaranteed an overall number of work hours.
Why should I hire professional web developer?
Building your own website takes knowledge, experience and skill. But importantly, your time. This means that you are not earning money for those hours and your attention becomes divided whilst you spend time on your developing a website. You could also make the grave error of using one of those instant website builder portals, and end up with a website that does not react well with Search Engines and often holds your design hostage as you may not move it away from them. Paying a Web Designer to do it for you means you can focus on your business and leave the website design to a professional who will undoubtedly do a better job and build your business propriety. Nothing says "flaky" business like a bad website!
They will build you a professional website in a fraction of the time. It will work. nothing worse than visiting a website with dead links and forms that don't submit after you have spent time filling them in!
Conclusion
There is no simple answer to this question. A website is a highly underestimated online marketing tool and is a valuable long term investment. It is therefore imperative to have a well built professional website. You should get the best website that you can afford.
With DiG, the process of developing the best website for your business is made more affordable because we do leverage well tried and tested OpenSource technology
This allows us to get websites up and running in under one week (provided all the content is given upfront) and at an affordable rate. This saves you hours of time but also gives you the most affordable website design while still looking amazing.
If you need an interactive well designed functional online business presence for your company or project, CONTACT US TODAY!
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