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How much do you pay a web designer?
futility
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
I'm trying to find a full time in house web designer for my company and have been putting out ads for to hire someone but haven't really gotten any bites other than from people working at firms. Right now we're offering like 15/hr for the job with benefits. Is that just waaaaaay too low?
Granted we're also a non-profit.
Granted we're also a non-profit.
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The median expected salary for a typical Web Designer - Web in the United States is $50,725
http://www.webdesignersalary.net/
Is saying the same thing.
So yeah it's too low, for a web designer. But if you got a kid in college or outta high school who knows how to use frontpage, manage a PHP forum, some java...
and provided you have the tools they would work well in....it would be ok I'm sure.
Maybe you just need to expand where you've been putting your ads? You ought to be able to get some interested folks.
We need a talented individual who is able work on, manage and design multiple websites for our company. Candidates must be highly organized and able to work on their own with an interest in working on a number of cool and differentiated projects.
Qualifications:
2+ years experience working in web design
Highly proficient in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, & Dreamweaver or similar software.
MUST HAVE working knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, Javascript , or other programming languages
Ability to multi-task when required
Strong desire to learn emerging technologies and to innovate new solutions
Desire to work with social and environmentally minded non-profit
Super Duper flexible
Position Details
This is a full time position at a non-profit organization. Pay is salary based for up to 30k a year DOE, Health/Dental benefits are included.
If interested please submit a resume, cover letter and links to any applicable examples of your previous work to the “Reply to” address above with "Web Designer" in the subject line. Please be advised that this is an in-house position.
Have you considered just contracting this out to a firm? It might be cheaper.
At that pay I would drop the experience requirement (or specify a degree may be substituted) and use the interview(s) to determine who really knows their stuff. You would probably get quite a bit more applicants bumping up to 40k-45k if you want someone who already has some experience.
Plus, you can only go up from someone who doesn't understand Dreamweaver...
I dunno about the rest, normally I would say that's a pretty low salary for someone like that, but I put up an ad on craigslist looking for designers and got hits from people I thought were really over-qualified for the pay, I assume due to the recession. Might want to list the benefits, that means different things to different people.
You aren't looking for a "web designer", you're really looking for an every-man.
With the requirements you listed, depending on the education level and your location, I would say 40k (four-zero) is the lower limit, more likely 45k+ for someone with actual talent.
And if Google Maps doesn't lie, you're a stones throw from LA so maybe even 47-50k would be reasonable.
30k will buy you the latest ITT tech fodder with a pirated copy of photoshop.
Basically we need to completely redo our company's web presence. We've had the same web site that covers everything, like a 2 bedroom house that's been rigged to accommodate a family of 50 and it's really time we tear the fucker down and rebuild. We also have a number of web related services we'd like to offer and develop new sites for, which is why we feel the need to have our own in house person.
That said, if I were a web-designer with the experience you're requiring, I'd expect $60,000 minimum. In a city where rent is $800-1,000 minimum, it can be tough to live on less than 35 (as you well know). Wages in the technical portions of this city are generally higher overall. Once you start getting creative involved, pay grade goes up. Intro pay for visual effects in LA is 40K and can quickly accelerate to 80 or 90 in just a year. That's what you're competing with.
If you want to pay someone $15 / hour, you need to drop the experience requirement and the coding requirements. And accept that you'll find someone who'll just almost fill the remaining responsibilities.
Then you're going to want someone with more than 2 years of experience. Luckily you're in a market that has the kind of talent to do all that stuff, but you've got to pay them.
Your alternative is to contract a web firm in a smaller market. As wallabee said, 60k isn't unreasonable at all especially based on your most recent post, and for 60k you could go to a small but talented firm and get a hell of a lot for that money without paying payroll taxes or benefits.
If you want, PM me some of your functional requirements, and I could probably give you some figures.
This threw me off because it starts out being a "MUST HAVE" but then ends in a "OR other programming languages" Web Developers (coders) are usually more expensive than designers. You seem to be looking for a web designer with coding experience. Your ad should reflect this.
It's a job board for the type of people that you're looking for. Web devs, designers, writers, etc... However, yea...15 is too low for what you're looking for.
As some other people have said, you aren't looking for a web designer, you're looking for someone who can code, who can do design, and someone who knows what they're doing with planning information architecture and managing all that web stuff so that your complete web rebuild doesn't end up a big mess. Not only that, it isn't very clear in your posting whether or not they're going to have to be doing any server-side administrative work as well.
$15/hour will get you 1 of those things, not 1 person who can do all of those things. Either hire separate people to do each and pay them less, or at least double the amount you're offering.
From what people are saying I'm going to try and revise the ad after talking to the other people I work with.
would it probably be better on to just find a firm to do the whole site, and then find someone later at the rate I'm paying for upkeep?
Have you considered opening the position up to telecommunism? You may have better luck if your sample size includes people who don't have to pay LA's cost of living.
The amount you're offering is the amount I was getting to do telecommuting, contract work as an undergraduate student. After taking a $10/hour cut because the company had no financing.
You'll do fine if you're hiring a company that's been around for a while and has over 10 people working there. Just don't go for the cheapest option and you'll find reliable help.
You need to shop the right places. There are droves of external firms that do good work.
we're trying to start. One of the issues now is that because the company has grown so much we need to differentiate between services we offer and "hey give us money".
Since I think you got the majority opinion on the tech specs, I'll add I thought this ad sounded not scammy, but maybe not professional? Bolded the parts that stood out to me. Who wouldn't want to work on "cool" projects?
I'd re-tool, taking some of the tech advice here, and if you can't pay more, play up the charity/non-profit angle more. That is, talk more about how you;re looking for someone who's dedicated to your org's mission, goals, etc.
Here is what I read between the lines from your ad:
Call me cynical but in this economy not getting a call for a web designer position means I'm not the only one reading it like that.
For one thing it helps to know the terms:
A web designer can mean many things, but most generically it is someone who actually designs how a website looks and feels. This is mainly a creative position: artwork & layout. It is expected that this person will have some HTML and CSS coding ability, that is, static code. Sometimes this person will even write the HTML that will be cut up to be used for dynamic content from the web developer. A designer may also be someone who designs user interfaces, but in large companies that is usually a specialized position.
A web developer is a programmer. Their job is to manipulate data, essentially. This is a software development (can be read 'engineering') position, not an artistic one. The list of "known" languages isn't so important because it is trivial to learn the syntax of a different object oriented language. Depending on the relationship between design and development at your organization, the web developer may only have a fleeting understanding of HTML and almost no dedicated developers I've met have any experience with CSS.
What you're looking for is someone who can do both. In your ad you may say Web Developer/Designer which will make it clear you're looking for an everyman. At $15/hr you may get someone who is just getting started, they may not be very good, they may talk a very strong game but crush under the pressure, but in the end if they do become confident they're going to go elsewhere.
Forget listing a string of software and languages the person needs to know. Like I said, with most web scripting languages it is trivial to learn a new one. Not many people have Python experience but it can be picked up in a weekend by an experienced programmer. "My pseudo-code compiles!" Why Python in particular, I wonder? Python isn't really considered one of the core web development languages. The line between web scripting and application development is blurring but Python still resides on the application side.
Dreamweaver experience is unnecessary. If you really want the person to use a specific development suite then they can sit down and learn it in a couple of hours.
Flash experience can mean a hundred different things. Flash applications? Flash video? Animation? Games? Websites? For one thing most of the things Flash was used for in the past is now being usurped by comprehensive javascript libraries. "We want Flash on our website" is something many clients have told me, but with no understand of why. If you want it for something like the NYT Lens blog that is entirely different than Flash used for graphical flare on a website. If you're really on such a tight budget, do without Flash or hire out small projects to a specialist.
In your ad you're asking for the applicant to have experience in over $3000 of development and art software. Do you know why that stuff is important? To me it seems like you don't. You're better off outlining what skills you want the person to have. If the person has the skills they can adapt to the software you guys own licenses for.
"Cool and differentiated projects" and "super duper flexible" don't inspire a lot of confidence. "What kind of airhead wrote this ad?", I ask myself. Also, what does that line about multi-tasking even mean? I have been the entire "web department" in a small business. It meant I had a lot of creative freedom. It also meant I was on call every day. When the co-located web server blips on New Years Eve at 11:45PM there is no one else with the capability of even knowing what the problem is.
In the end, I get that you're a non-profit and don't have a huge budget. If your web presence is important you'll figure out how to pay someone reasonably for the vast experience and responsibility you want them to have.
When writing your next job ad try to figure out what you really need done. Write it professionally, no one wants to work for airheads. Be specific about what the job entails, not what software suites you want them to know. Talk about the structure. If you have an IT department of 10 people then say so. If you expect them to run hardware, say so. If they work under a communications director or are alone, say so. If they will be required to write copy or create art, say so, and be specific.
But when it comes down to it, I've made web sites and applications for manufacturers, marketers, bars, massage therapists, and retailers and to me it's all one and the same kind of work. Don't expect the good feeling that comes from working with whale savers to make up for the other half of the income they could be making elsewhere.
We want someone better than we have now, which is someone who doesn't understand layout, how to manage content, barely understands how to make a picture appear, and has clocked out when it comes to pretty much anything (and we can't get rid of the guy)
We want someone who is better than our other tech guys
Ultimately we want a clean looking website that makes our company look respectable and not stuck in 1993 while having another site that sells our goods and services. The goods and services part we really feel merits having someone in house because well, there are a lot of divisions of the company that need more than the fancy online brochure that they have now. Flash for interactivity and pretty prettiness.
Yes we have other projects that we'd like to make and while I don't feel comfortable discussing them, I know that they require coding.
You can probably just hire a decent developer to do backend stuff and ship out the frontend to overseas HTML shops, depending on your framework.
That said, I wouldn't take this job for $30K a year, and I live in Michigan. The web designers I work with rate a lot more than that.
I would say that you should prescribe less in the ad, and instead ask for a portfolio of previous work (and actually look at it critically). Big companies with big web departments can afford to hire hotshot green people straight out of school for these kinds of things, but you're relying on this person to be solely responsible for you web presence. You need proven results.
The only two concrete requirements for web development are being able to program and having an understanding of how html/css/javascript work together (and really, that second is easy to fill in if the candidate is able to program well, plus it's easy to judge based on the portfolio).
Design sense can also be judged from the portfolio, and may not be that important. Keep in mind this person doesn't need to be a designer - I'm sure there are other people in your organization with a good design sense that would be able to handle that. The main skills that you're lacking are technical ones. No reason to pay for an artist if you don't need one.
it depends on location, but I'll give you an example: with 10 years of experience freelancing and two or three in a design firm, I charge $35 an hour -- and that's on the very low end of a freelance rate, because the economy is terrible. in bigger cities, I've heard of freelance designers charging up to $125 an hour, depending on a variety of factors -- but believe me, I've seen what $15 an hour buys you, and there's nothing "super duper" about it. I got paid $15 an hour to be a glorified receptionist at a design agency for a while; I would never take an actual design gig for that rate.
in my opinion, you should rewrite your ad and make it more honestly directed in either one direction or the other: good, or cheap.
oh and as to outsourcing: I'm learning that a lot of places have been burned by hiring an offsite contractor (which sucks for me, because I am an offsite contractor). it will expand your options, but again -- for $15 an hour, you're likely to get dumped at the first sign of any client with a higher rate. which will be everyone.
I would nix the Flash requirement completely. It's pretty, but you're on a tight budget and Flash is an extra bauble.
Keep in mind that an acceptable offsite design will cost about $5k-$15k depending on quality and experience. Anything lower than that and you're getting crap made from "export to html" from photoshop.
It's a bit more pricey than you're looking at, but I think it's the most affordable way to get what you want.
honestly, once you start undercutting price/outsourcing your killing the industry. pay what you would to a tutor or buy some books and do it your self
or up your price and realize that maybe everyone could code, but for good design, your looking at about .0001% of the population
Any real website designer/developer won't be using Dreamweaver (or iWeb). For the amount you're paying (and this is coming from an underpaid graphics designer), you should look at hiring someone fresh out of college, or still in school as an intern.
Yeah, really. I make 15/h as a graphic designer and i wouldnt take this job now. Fresh out of school, maybe. But then again, fresh out of school i had absolutely no idea what good layout was (compared to people who actually do this for a living and had more than 6 months experience). If you had stuck me in a shop with no one to fall back on, id probably still be turning out terrible work.
For the experience you want, this isnt going to happen. Like others have said, if youre 100% deadset on paying 15/h, throw experience out the door and look at their portfolios. You may get lucky and find someone whos fresh out of school, awesome, and desperately needs a job. But at the same time, since youre basically going to be stacking your entire web presence ontop of them, expect to have to pay them at least double by next year, or theyre going to be walking away with the experience and getting a better job. Otherwise youre going to end up losing one of your core people and scrambling to replace them. That always sucks.
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Yeah, sure, you don't have a guy there for half the day, but on the other hand, you do have someone with good skills at your disposal.
Because the only way you will get a good web designer/programmer working for you at $15/hr is by holding a gun to his head as he works.