Hi there. Probably a silly question but I’m about to do a website for an upcoming grill house. I will use CMS for it but I’m new to using it. Am I right in saying that the website owner would need their own webflow account in order for them to be able to add items and make changes to the menu through CMS?
I also wondered if anyone had experience in building similar sites and whether they had any advice for offering maintenance packages for running the site? The site would also be used to promote upcoming events, new services, food/drink items so more than likely would need updated weekly/monthly. I was going to charge around £10 a month for running it for them ontop of the webflow website cost.
If you host the site from your account, you’re going to add your client as an Editor on the project. TYhey’ll get the invite, create a login and be an Editor from there. Wether they can use this to connect to a Webflow account is accessory.
That’s always the question, you create a site then what?
I advise you to make them pay a flat fee of 350-450 for the hosting for a year + maintenance tasks. If extra tasks go over that budget, you tell them.
Hey Vincent! Really appreciate you taking the time to help me out.
It’s a fairly new grill house. They wouldn’t even be considering working with me until I said I could do the whole 5 page project for less than £500. I just know if I ask for anything upfront they won’t have the budget. Do you do monthly amounts at all with clients? Or do you always charge upfront for wbeflow and maintenance? I thought this would be a cool way to learn how to fine tune maintenance plans on monthly basis to get a more stable cashflow?
I’ve not had many clients outside Fiverr so new to all of this. I’ll get a feel for it all in time I’m sure.
I had restaurants as clients too but I stopped because they rarely have the minimum decent budget for their site. With creative ways you can do stuff however. Like this site, they’re not skilled wirth computers at all, and using the CMS Editor on a computer is out of their league. So their homepage just shows the first or nth images from their instagram, on various sections. Their CMS is actually Instagram and posts appears at different places on their site. So a menu ? Picture it and it’s on the site.
Hey Vincent! I always never get notified when people reply. Is there a way I can update that? I hadn’t realized you had replied as no notification when I sign in?
Anyway, thanks again for the reply. I’ll bare that in mind about their limited budget. But’s it’s an awesome way to get a little experience until I build up my skills and confidence in designing.
I just came back from the initial meeting. Such a cool guy and it will be a super creative project. So you reckon CMS might not be the best idea for the food menu as they wouldn’t fully utilise it? I sold them on the idea they can easily log in and make adjustments to menu items and price etc quickly and easily?
Also just to add, they are now looking for a booking system for tables, and, they want a separate takeaway menu where customers can actually place orders from their own site rather than Justeat(similar to uber eats UK). Have you or anyone had experience with external plug-ins for adding this? It’s going to be a really out of the box/quirky design. So my concern would be the design scope matching up with the website design. They are all quite basic. Not sure if I can integrate an e-commerce type page from webflow?
@Gareth_Ellison The CMS works perfectly for restaurants. Adding them as a user means they get access to the designer which you definitely don’t want.
Building out a custom booking system for tables is a massive undertaking for the budget assigned. I’d be very wary of this going way over scope and ripping through any of your spare time.
For third party software, you can use it, but you won’t be able to design it to any extensive level. That being said, you will absolutely need to use 3rd-party for this project. Any type of out-of-the-box ecom isn’t going to be able to handle this sort of system.
I know you’re just getting your toes wet, so a bit of scope creep isn’t the end of the world. But you can push back on this sort of stuff. If you don’t, it will not only cost you hundreds of unpaid hours, but it’ll also ruin your reputation with the client because you set the expectation that you could do what they wanted for £500 - not realizing the real scope of the project.
To give you an idea of how much they’re asking for, a 5 page website with a custom-designed table booking system, CMS menus, and custom order placement software could easily run north of $15k-40k USD. A custom 5 page site with none of the bells and whistles would be closer to $6k-9k for us as a comparison.
Hey Robert. I just realized you had added a message to this post. The pricing you estimated blew my mind! It’s a funny one. As currently my thought process is to do an incredible (above and beyond) job on every bit of work, and hopefully build up a reputation and therefore asking price for websites. Not sure your thoughts on that?
The trouble I have as a newbie (kinda) is gaining momentum/traction in order to get more work. It is food for thought, however. What I’m doing right now is not sustainable. I have to work taxis full time and design. This job for £600 is gonna take me 2 months! Guess I’m over-eager and just want to do a good job and impress. Hoping that somewhere along the line I can compete for high-paying jobs.
Not sure if other designers get this, but when I have an idea and know I might be able to do it, I like to test and push myself to get it. The downside, it takes me forever to build anything for very little money.
Awesome Stan! Thanks so much. These are things I need to learn fast.
This client is so so cool! It’s me who’s offering the world knowing what I ‘can’ pull off. I dig my own grave. I just never want to do ordinary work if I know I can do more. But doesn’t help with pennies! I want my bum out the taxis and into design! Yesterday! I’m sure it will come. In the meantime I will have a read of that link. Hopefully helps me with new clients.
It’s a funny one. As currently my thought process is to do an incredible (above and beyond) job on every bit of work, and hopefully build up a reputation and therefore asking price for websites. Not sure your thoughts on that?
These are things I need to learn fast.
I’m sure it will come. In the meantime I will have a read of that link. Hopefully helps me with new clients.