Estimating the time it takes to build a website
One question that is put to me from time to time is:
“… how can you budget the amount of time it will take to build a website?”
This can be a tricky thing because there are so many factors involved:
- How fast do you work?
- Is your client going to be really picky and ask for many revisions?
- Are you likely to come across time consuming bugs?
Ultimately, you will have to learn how fast it takes YOU … to build a website.
This comes with practice but there are few things that can make your web design budgets more accurate and that can also help you to control the time you spend building a web site.
Begin timing yourself
Start making time estimates for each website, and then track the actual time it takes you to complete a project. Soon, you will start getting better at making estimates. Be sure to track particular parts of the web design process:
- Time dealing with the client. Phone calls, meetings, writing out contracts etc…
- Time it takes to create the basic look of the site.
- Time it takes to build out the actual pages – after you’ve established the look.
- Time it takes to add in any special functionality. Example: add a blog, shopping cart etc…
Controlling the time by controlling your clients
Often times, how well you manage your clients, will figure into how accurate your budgets are. If you let them, most clients will have you running in circles, as they constantly ask for changes and additions to the website – at no extra cost of course!
… This is all too common and will eat away at your profit and sanity. You must learn to manage your clients. I would suggest the following:
- Set up a maximum of 3 revisions on a fixed price quote. If your client insist on a fixed price for a job (most do), then you must set limits on how many times you will change things for them.
- When a client says ‘yes’ to some piece of work, have then sign off on it.
- Before you start the web design work, be sure you detail in the contract, exactly what you are providing. Count pages, functionality etc.
Complexity in the project can be time traps
In a nutshell: as a project becomes more complex in terms of the functionality (complicated CMS updates, custom e-commerce work etc) you should factor in that you will have a much greater chance of running into unforeseen bugs.
… If you are doing something you have not done before, or you are integrating a complex component, you should make your best time estimate, and then multiply it by 2.4.
The 2.4 rule of time estimation
This is an engineering rule that I picked up from an uncle of mine who ran huge government projects. Based on his 25 years experience, he found that the best budgets had to be multiplied by 2.4 to get a truly accurate assessment.
Big projects are harder to estimate than little ones, nonetheless, when it comes to unknowns, this multiplier is a nice way to protect yourself.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
May 5th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Thank you for your good post. I like what you wrote on “Controlling the time by controlling your clients”, this can be very helpful for every design comapany. Most of the time we found out that client is slow and picky. Sometime we feel like the job is endless and make us want to give up.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
When designing a website, there are plenty of applications available to track time spent. The one I prefer is called Fanurio. Clear communication with your client is essential to managing time.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:41 am
It’s very important to set the client’s expectations up front. If you allow too much feature-creep and/or things that are completely out of scope to come into play, a project can quickly spin out of control. I have found it useful to use a written contract and a design document. My estimate also breaks the project down into chunks. With these expectations set, most clients are reasonable, and additional work can be done under another project.
I agree that project estimation can be harder on bigger project but breaking it down into segments makes it a little bit easier.
Good post Stefan!
May 9th, 2008 at 6:55 am
This article is very useful to prepare a web design quote. I totally agree with “The best budgets had to be multiplied by 2.4 to get a truly accurate assessment.”
Some of our Clients will ask so many revisions, that time we can’t expect dollars for extra work. The agreement must be very clear with client before start the work.
Very good one Stefan!!
May 10th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
When developing a basic, static site I like to breakdown the process into several steps; allowing the client to pay as I go. Phase 1 is home page design which is composed in Photoshop. It allows me to easily manipulate elements (logos, fonts, text size, colors, etc.) across the page. Price is determined by 2 factors, size of business (small, medium or large) and number of initial home page examples. Thus I might budget only 6 hours for two to three designs for a small company, and/or thirty hours for four to five home page examples for a corporation. Don’t forget to also factor in meetings which again in relative to the size of the company. Once a home page design has been “finalized” then on to Phase 2, secondary pages, again composed in Photoshop but only 1 option to choose from. I usually budget one to three hours per page. A contact page might only take an hour but a press page might take three. The final phase 3 is html coding. I take the total number of hours dedicated to design and divide it by 2. Hope this helps some people out there.