Communication is 80% of the project budget

During a scoping exercise with a client I made an estimate I never have made before, as a baseline for the exercise:

How much effort would it take to design and build a fully-featured CMS-driven website if you completely trusted me to design it?

If I had nothing else in the shop, and there were no comps and no rounds of revisions? And I don’t mean a half-ass website but something really beautiful, with a hand-drawn logo and hand-rolled code.

Two weeks. USD $5,000.

That was clarifying! My usual soup-to-nuts greenfield website is generally somewhere between four to ten times that much effort.

Pushing around pixels and code on my computer is, at best, 20% of the effort that goes into “making a website.” Note that this even includes “thinking about pushing around pixels and code!”

Everything else is “communication.”

Either literally: emails and chats and meetings and zoom calls.

Or figuratively: trying to understand and accommodate what I heard in the emails and chats and meetings and zoom calls.

This is why, when we are worried about resources, cutting features saves us pennies (honestly, to build a calendar takes like one afternoon…), and why the contract only has “one round of revisions.”

Completely honest offer:

If you want a beautiful hand-built website and trust me so much we never need to talk about it, I will build you one for $5,000.

(Caveat: I do not actually have two free weeks RN)