How much to charge for website maintenance?

[WhitePhantom]

Hi,

Just wondering what kind of maintenance figures do other people charge for software updates on Joomla / WordPress /ZenCart sites?

I've done a couple of these sites where I didn't factor this in (d'oh!) and I'm now putting together another couple of proposals, so I want to build this in as a monthly figure and just looking for some ballpark figures.

Many thanks!

 

[Forbairt]

What is your hourly rate ... how much work will be involved in the updates ... are you giving them a set number of hours a month for this ? Will you be doing extra graphics and so on for them ..

Maybe come up with the basic plan ... medium plan ... full service (20 hours a month or something) ... and then tell them your hourly rate if they require changes

Shameless self plug here but take a look at the rates tables on there
http://www.jameslarkin.ie/2010/02/14/what-should-i-be-charging-for-webdesign/

(Also ask yourself how badly you need the money ... this is usually a deciding factor in how much you charge unfortunately and ends up with a lot of people selling themselves short)

Hope that helps somewhat
James

 

[WhitePhantom]

Thanks James, and I appreciate the 'shameless plug', some good food for thought there!

Do you do any cms websites for your clients? And if so have you used Joomla or Wordpress? I've been designing websites in DW for years, but I'm doing a few using these 2 cms's now, just want to keep adding to what I can do. I haven't actually done an upgrade in either of them yet, so I don't know how long it will take me. I'm in real 'how long is a piece of string' territory there!

I'm doing a ZenCart upgrade at the moment though, and my god what a nightmare!! I'm sure that's largely because it's my first ZC upgrade and I'm figuring it all out as I go, but I'm tempted to leave the country and become a goat farmer in the Himalayas at this stage!

 

[Forbairt]

Most websites I've done are running on CMS's of one sort or another ...

I tend to steer clear of Joomla ... don't like it that much

CMSMS would be my CMS of choice .. clients love it too ...and very easy to template
Wordpress I quite like as well .. depends on the requirement and then there is custom stuff

Upgrades can take 2 minutes or 22 hours depending on the system ... Magento for example can be a complete ***** when it comes to upgrades .. I've yet to have an upgrade run completely smoothly

For the most part wordpress upgrades will depend on a number of things ...
1: plugin compatibility
2: theme features you've implemented
(probably more I can't think of right now) everyone runs into issues at some stage ... main thing is backup first before any upgrades (database and files)
Most wordpress upgrades these days go fairly handily for me ... though on some sites where they were running about 20 plugins things blow up and you can't access either the admin interface or the site ... if that happens and you don't know a few tricks .. you can be slightly screwed.

Zen Cart / OS Commerce ... can be a bit of a nightmare as well depending on how clean a template you're using to begin with .. if memory serves me correctly they were all heavily table based with multiple levels of "box" tables in most of the older templates. Plugins aren't kept up to date .. so things can get VERY messy there.