How long should a website take to build?

Hi, my name is Dan. In this video, we're going to talk about time budgeting. You're going to have to work out for yourself, and for the client, how long these things are going to take.

And, for the types of websites I do a lot of-- there are 5 to 25 pages, kind of brochure websites, I don't need any extra help, I do them on my own. They tend to take 1-2 months. Now, that's not full time, and often I'll have 2 or 3 jobs going on all the time, because this is a bit of 'to'ing and fro'ing'; you do this work, pass it over to the client, wait for them to get back, weekends, and all sorts of stuff happens, holidays, then they'll get back, you'll have some other clients to work with; tends to be 1 to 2 months. 

Now, in terms of the hours that happens, I've got to look through some of the invoices here just to set out the hours, and roughly about 60 hours, so it's a little over a week of work spread across those couple of months. The trouble when you're new is that, you're probably going to have double or triple that time, but you can't charge anymore, you still might be charging $2000 for a website, but you might be doing triple the hours than me. 

So, I can do-- quite often the prices ends up being very similar if you go out to a pricing of a bunch of different freelancers, they come up very similar, but in terms of, if they came to me, I'm reasonably experienced, so I'm going to go back, and I'm going to be able to knock that out quite quickly, whereas somebody else is going to have that same cost, or the same price, but it's going to take a lot longer to complete. And that's going to be you at the beginning. It's going to take you a lot longer, but as you get better and if you enjoy it like I do-- I got better, quicker, now I can knock out quite a few websites in those couple of months, for my income.   

Now, one of the other things is, when you are giving it to the client, have a look through to think how long it's going to take me, do I need help, and then double the time that you think it is, because it always takes that long. And nobody's ever worried that you deliver a website two weeks early, but they'll be really annoyed when it's two weeks late, even though you made up this number, and the client didn't get back to you. 

Quite often they're surprised, they'll sit down at a meeting, they'll talk about the topic about the timing, and I work out that's going to take four months, and they're kind of like, 'Four months?' And I explain that this is how long it's going to take, and my experience is-- how long it will take? It could be done in two months, but it's probably going to be four, and when you deliver in three, everybody is super happy, but when you try and deliver it in five, you have awkward conversations with the bill, and those sorts of things at that stage, so, make sure when you're ever doing timing, double it.