Pricing a Project, part 2
In the last post I explained some of our basic rates for our most popular services. These prices are downright cheap compared to the prices for the print side. Here’s their advertising rates, and a comparison in prices:
Full Page Ad
- e-list: $250
- printed ad: $875
Banner Ad
- Editorial e-list, leaderboard size: $45
- 1/4 page, 3 column print: $315
Perceived Quality & Brand Positioning: a lesson in marketing that still smarts a bit
Did I mention there is an extra charge for putting colors into the print ads? The web-based ads are all expected to be full-color designs. I have had clients who were downright offended when I designed a banner ad in black and white. “Your ink colors are free. Why is my ad in B&W?” I only show these starkly contrasted prices to again state the point that the Web department is seen as a bonus, or a perk. We spend just as much time (sometimes more, once you count the programming) designing and building ads for our clients as our print peers do; because everything is digital, however, there is an automatic assumption that our designs are “easier” to build…leading to ridiculous expectations about prices (our services always cost too much) and deadlines.The poor web coordinators get calls on Monday for a full page e-list and the clients expect it to be designed, built as a web page, proofread, and proofed out to them the same day, so they can send the e-list out tomorrow. Ridiculous. Ask for that same ad from the Angus Journal magazine, and your deadline is the 15th of the second month before the magazine is sent out – 6 weeks of advance notice!
The point being, price points affects a client’s attitude and position on a service. While this is not breaking news to anyone with a familiarity in marketing, it really surprised me how true it is. I knew pricing could work well for a newly minted lawyer (charge just as much as everyone else, and people will assume you are a good lawyer), but it until I began working here I never saw it in action. I learned a great deal of marketing concepts while working for fast food, but premium pricing never applied in context.
Pricing the Miscellaneous Category
The majority of our sales potential will come from developing the latest and greatest services available exclusively on the web. While our prices will probably remain stagnant for the listed services, I forsee the off-the-list services delivered for a premium. A la carte items such as an XML-driven, Flash-based slideshow, a fully animated Flash site, and simple Content Management Systems are what I expect to create in the near future. With each completed project a new service or feature will be offered and the web department will be expected to recoup the losses from time spent developing it.
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Pricing a Project
From reading the blogs kept by other designers, I know that this subject is normally taboo. However, the cattle industry expects transparency in pricing from their advertising agencies, so this is a well-covered subject whenever we get orders in for projects.
It is no easy task to say, “Your web site will cost X number of dollars,” because prices vary from one project to another, depending on the demands and expectations of our customers. Obviously a more complex project equals more money required to build it. What my clients do not understand is just how inexpensive our service are when compared to other advertising agencies.
This is our current pricing structure and fees.
Building a website:
3 Comps to choose from – free
$100 per main page built
$20 per “break-off” page
$35 an hour to put content into site
E-mailed advertisements:
2 kinds available: e-lists, which are full-length e-mailed ads, and banner blasts, which are small banner ads grouped together and sent as one e-mailed ad.
E-Lists:
Custom designed e-list, sent once – $250 each
Camera-ready art, sent once – $185 each
Custom designed e-list that will be sent two or more times – $185 each
Banner Blasts:
All Banner Blasts are custom designed.
Banner Blast that links to your website, sale book, or camera-ready ad – $45
Banner Blast linking to an ad we previously designed – $185
Banner Blast linking to a newly designed full page ad – $250
Building an online sale book:
Posted to your website – $100
Posted to our Sale Books page – $300
Buy a printed Sale Book and receive the online version free!
I disagree with the last one, but Angus Association members receive many of our services as perks, starting with very low prices for building a website and not exactly ending with the free online sale book. We are not considered a necessity to the Angus Journal, yet. I am hoping the projects we are currently developing will help change that attitude. No, sorry, I can’t elaborate on those just yet.
Banner Ads
Advertised on AngusJournal.com or AngusBeefBulletin.com – $275 per month
Advertised on a Real-Time Coverage site – $150 per event
Most of this basic information can be found on the Web Services Rates Page. With my next post, it will be a discussion of the prices left off of the Rates page.
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CSS Workshop
My goal is to be able to build a viable, purely CSS template, unfettered by dependencies of GoLive or Dreamweaver templates. Considering there are over 200 Web sites (and growing!) that our Web department maintains, moving to pure CSS designs would be a big advantage.
Tim (my co-worker) and I recently took a CSS workshop and are working on layouts using pure CSS. We’ve started this switch in steps. We were already using Cascading Style Sheets to manipulate text; now we’re creating menus with image rollovers and text links that work seamlessly together. I just finshed a redesign for the Fink Beef Genetics site – it is a hybrid of tables and CSS.
I’m lessening my dependency on tables in steps. I want to make sure I have solid CSS coding skills [as in, not abusing DIV tags in my HTML and not getting class-happy in my CSS], before implementing a pure CSS template for a real site.
One of the neat uses for CSS I’ve discovered recently is the ability to have an image rollover effect while still using text links. See the new Fink Beef Genetics design for an example. Why is this important? Because adding to or taking away from their navigation is now simplified. All I have to do is delete a line of code or add a line of code. With the old way, it would take hours to modify the navigation; now it takes just minutes.
With navigation, using an image rollover or images as the navigation can be a pain. Yes, you get the exact font you saw in your comp., but robots crawling your site can’t read where the navigation leads to, and images take longer to load than plain text. Also, when a change in the navigation is requested, I have to:
- Go back to the original comp. and rebuild the navigation by hand,
- Save the new images, and replace the old images with the new,
- Rebuild the entire template from scratch.
For a larger site like Eby, this is a huge undertaking. Go ahead, visit their horses section. Notice the image links at the top of the page? The one named “Pedigrees?” Changing that from “Horses” took several hours of work. While it sounds like a simple request (and it should be), because of the old systems in place, it takes a ridiculous amount of time to fix.
So, pure CSS sites are a win-win situation for our clients because:
- Navigation loads faster, and without the errors that JavaScript can sometimes encounter.
- The layout loads once. With tables, the layout has to load again and again, with each new page request. Essentially, the client’s web site now takes seconds to load on a dial-up connection, instead of minutes.
- The web site naturally becomes more handicap-accessible. This is good for all visitors (handicapped or not), and it also makes the site easier for the search engines to find, crawl, and index (or file, as the print world says it).
More to come. As we head into our busy season, there may not be much time available to devote to new projects; but no matter how busy it gets, we are always making improvements as we go along.
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