Thatβs either a professional level dad joke, or holy wow, does he not know how much you make?
That said, Iβll build anyone a website for Β£500, no matter how large. But thatβs the base model. Itβll be a template taken from a catalog, and Hugo. My maintenance fees are only Β£250 per hour.
Itβs a pretty good racket. My friends boss saw us building ourselves a site one time when he let us use his shop on the weekend and he got intrigued.
So as payment for letting us use the machine shop we took over his business website from some expensive marketing company that charged a ton we got him down to a domain and a basic weebly plan. We took photos of the shop and just used their shop colors for the text and slapped on all the contact info he wanted.
Then his bookkeeper saw his site and wanted one so we did the same for her, then her son saw the site and wanted one for his friend whoβs a plumber. Next thing you know we are turning down jobs because everyone and their mother wants a $500 website from us haha. It became a better business than what we borrowed the machine shop for to begin with
Static, low-js, HTML tags used-as-intended, some basic CSS for formatting, responsivity and dark/light. Modern-looking accessible webpage from scratch done in half a day.
Btw, https://github.com/lyoshenka/awesome-motherfucking-website
The irony of some dude trying to prove a point that a website doesnβt need to be bloated and burdened with all the design and fancy scripts, just for other people to incrementally built on top of that idea, one-upping each other in the process, mimicking the exact evolution of the modern bloated website as we know it.
From one of them:
βYouβre a fucking moron if you use default browser styles.β
Or just change your browser settings (they shouldnβt be ugly by default).
Honestly I hate the fact that browsersβ default CSS exists. The person doing the frontend should have to specify their βdefaultβ CSS before the website even loads. I say this as both a user and a programmer, the same website shouldnβt look different or break on different browsers unintentionally due to the browserβs CSS, and I as a developer shouldnβt have to rely on reset sheets to try to patch that.
Everything would be better if it were swapped around, instead of picking out a reset sheet for a site you pick out a default styleβ¦
The world would also be better if browsers rendered pugjs/slim and scss/sass and those were the default rather than html and css but I digressβ¦
If we assume βhalf a dayβ is 4 hours, and 500 pounds. Thatβs 125 pounds per hour. Which isnβt the worst rate. Assuming itβs actually capped at 4 hours and we all know that if itβs your dadβs friend, this is not going to be a set and forget kind of thing. So that 4 hours quickly becomes 10. And suddenly youβre down to 50 pounds per hour. And then if itβs actually static and simple and good, you still have high odds of getting insane feedback demanding changes to make it worse. A motherfucking website would actually be the best option, but wouldnβt get you paid. At that point youre just doing it for the lols.
But ultimately, this isnβt even about the rate or how much time this will take. this whole scenario depends heavily on the son here. Is the son unemployed and living in dadβs basement for free? Then yeah. Sorry, he should probably take any work he can get for any rate he can get. His dad gets a lot more say in how things work financially if the son is relying on him financially. But if the son is already working a full time job and living in his own house? Then no, I donβt care what the rate is. Donβt commandeer other peopleβs time. Donβt make deals that people havenβt agreed to. Come to me with opportunities, not demands.
Yeah, sorry, i couldnβt resist to hint on how ridicolously overengineered most professional webpages are.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
Youβre not wrong, but a lot of time those webpages arenβt overengineered because the developer wanted it to be, but because the client kept making more and more demands.
Itβs one website. How much could it cost, Β£500?
You sound like a LinkedIn influencer:
I shat my pants; this is why this is a great opportunity to network!
In most industries, thatβs considered a bait and switch. Decpetice conduct that can lead to fines.
If you contact them immediately, to rectify an error, then not so much.
Iβm saying they should not get to the point that they walk in the door. If they call, correct immediately.
It should be corrected, by Dad, prior to a call, rather than used as a sales funnel, which is the suggestion.
Honest mistakes happen, but using an honest mistake to purposefully continue to mislead to get them in the door and then correct them is a bait and switch.
5000 pages, including e-commerce integration and bespoke search. Β£500!