Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Business

Posted by Joe Grable
Joe Grable
6,284 Points

Job Billing

Hi, I have a client who wants to take their old website and make it mobile responsive. I charge hourly rates, but i've never done a job like this. My clients before have only ever asked me to code entire websites and I make them mobile responsive from the get go, but I've never taken someone else's code and edited it to a mobile responsive site.

my question: I have no idea what to charge for something like this? (flat fee, hourly)?? how long does it take some of you to take an old site and make it responsive?

please help, thanks Joe :)

3 Answers

Chase Lee
Chase Lee
29,275 Points
Chase Lee
Chase Lee
29,275 Points

I don't know. But I assume that it would be longer to make it responsive. The reason is because when you are coding it by yourself from the beginning you know it inside and out. This you have to study the site. Also there might be some stuff in there that you have to change because it is mot responsive friendly.

missgeekbunny
missgeekbunny
37,033 Points
missgeekbunny
missgeekbunny
37,033 Points

If you could be upfront and honest about about your hours when billing I would just go hourly and be sure to clock your time carefully. I'm not sure how you would flat rate something like that because you have no clue what kind of work needs to be done there. You may be rebuilding the site from the ground up or you may just be adding a few css rules. You won't really know until you get into the code.

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points
Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points

From the get go, plan for a day of just familiarising yourself with the site and make sure to see the code before you take the job on. It may be that it's easier to rewrite it from scratch and cost the client less.

Then, once you've spent an hour or so looking at the code, experience should tell you roughly how many days you'll want. Best bet is to look at it as if you're making a new site. You technically are, the assets have been delivered and now you have to write it. With the day for familiarising yourself, that's probably the HTML written if you were actually doing it from scratch.

So, look at the code to make sure it can actually be done and then charge what you would for a fresh build.

Joe Grable
Joe Grable
6,284 Points

thank you for that, it helped a lot.

curiousity: do you have experience doing something like this? I know it's all very circumstantial, varying from project to project, but I'm curious to here how long it takes other people.

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points
Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points

Yes and no, two examples.

  1. I work in WordPress. Usually I build a theme from scratch because it takes as long to build a theme from scratch as it does to edit a theme I've bought, prime example of editing taking as long as building. The only time I will edit a bought theme is if it contains functionality that I can't build better, such as the theme I've bought for my hosting company website. It's not perfect but what it comes with, will do for now so I'm editing. However, I've spent more time familiarising myself with the framework and learning what I can do in it, then if I'd done the front end from scratch. The backend has a lot of functionality that does the job fine, so that's why I'm using it. The net time to build it with front and back end, is less using the theme then building from scratch.

  2. I get given other developer's sites to work on and it varies from dealing with their quirks like using underscores to conjoin class names whereas I use hyphens, to ripping it apart and starting again. A lot of the programmers in places that do it like a production line, code badly. The code works, but to try and edit it is a nightmare. I had a WordPress site where half the files for the theme were outside the theme directory and the other half were in. It was a mix of PHP and WordPress, total nightmare to work out. In this instance, I took what I wanted, the data, and the site was built again from scratch.

I hope these examples help out. Converting to responsive will be very similar. You may find that the simple layout like a packed nav bar will require significant redesign and you end up recoding that entire part of the site.