In part one, we talked about the typical price range for web designers' services, dealing mainly with the core work of actual design. Here, in part two, we'll talk about other services often bundled by even more-highly skilled web designers, and the price ranges and justifications for those prices.

Adding Business Consulting

Professional web designers with the skills to also serve as consultants about business, technology, and other issues, can brazenly charge between $150 to $500 per hour.

Of course, at this point we're not talking strictly about web designer skills - we're talking about what people will pay for a single professional or group who can fuse diverse skills and services into every decision. The end result becomes a huge cost savings for the buyer. Compare the scenarios.

Paying Separately for a Web Designer and a Consultant:

• Pay $150-300 per hour for a consultant to analyze, research, and then write a report.

• Then pay internal staff to digest the report and translate it into web designer instructions.

• Then pay the web designer $30 to $150 per hour, starting with a detailed consultation to bring the designer up-to-speed about the outcome of the consultation.

Paying One Person Who's Both a Web Designer and Consultant:

• Pay $150-500 per hour beginning with initial consultations.

• Designer analyzes and researches the issues, skips the detailed report (saving 20 hours or more) and goes straight to a project plan that's ready for a quick thumbs-up.

• The plan gets the green light. In a typical 120 to 360 hour project, some 40-60 billable hours are saved because the designer knows the plan and supporting logic intimately, cutting out all needs for communication.

The result: The project is done one or two weeks sooner, representing an immediate savings of thousands of dollars. Business experts understand that, at prices like this, for a web designer who can handle projects requiring that level of foresight, $300-500 per hour is a steal.

Adding Programming

When you add programming to a web designer's project, that's another set of tasks altogether. When programming is involved, whether it's server side programming or UI programming, a single developer can charge prices that seem high compared to another web designer's bid, until you think about how the project is likely to pan out.

Many projects require a high degree of knowledge in either Flash and ActionScript, or Javascript and DOM, in order to finish. More deeply-interactive projects also require server-side systems, involving databases and a dual-layer of code, to complete. Although some designers with those skills wouldn't call themselves programmers, this is a very different skill set than the typical web designer can muster.

Paying two different professionals to pull that project off, will be much more expensive than hiring a designer who can handle both aspects themselves. Designers who know this, can freely charge between $100 and $600 per hour, depending on the complexity of the project.

A web designer who bills in this price range can still represent a bargain compared to the time spent facilitating communication between two separate professionals, and the added costs of time in between phases of the project. The cost of alternative development patterns can quickly balloon far out of control, largely because of issues of time.

The reason: both the programmer and the designer will have completely different output formats for the project. The first person will get their job done, and the second person will find the files incomprehensible and near-impossible to work with. The professional handling stage two of the project might spend up to two full-time weeks just making heads or tails out of where to start the next leg of the project.

Conclusions On Web Designer Prices

The extremely professional, highly-skilled nature of a web designer's work, not to mention the very high risks involved for failed and extended projects - these are the main reasons why web designer billable rates remain stable.

The professional buyer needs the right amount of foresight to choose their professionals wisely based on the type of projects. Doing so, one can often save tons of money, sometimes more than 50% of the final cost of the project, by shopping at the far-upper end of the web designer price range.