I used to compete with the kid down the street who would do a website for $50 and a can of coke. Young people's lives are dynamic and change fast, and therefore depending on a very young school or college age webdesigner can result in the client being left holding the bag on a website they can no longer administer (lost docs, passwords, backups, lost domain name, etc). I now charge $75hr for business clients (5 or more employees) and $50hr for mom and pop shops (4 or less employees). Standard IT networking sysadmin, and programming rates vary from $45 to $85hr on avg across the nation, and really it comes down to how good you are, and how much you want the work. At $45 or less, it is simply not worth my time....life is too short. Now that I charge more (I used to charge as little as $25hr), I am happier, my clients are more impressed with the work (I guess they only value what the pay for, the more they pay the more they seem to value the work.....people are funny that way).
I try to do the harder stuff, like the layout, imaging, navigation,
seo, javascript, tables, and the first pass of the iamges and prose myself. I often try to involve some of my clients in making simple changes themselves, like prices, rates, seasonal photos, or text. When they get a taste of what is involved, they are much more humble and more appreciative of the rate they are being charged.
Anyway, I have so much work to do now, I generally won't take on an
SEO campaign, for example for less than $3200 unless the site is pre-existing and is already ripe for
SEO.
On the Design side, some pages (like an interactive search page, or e-commerce page, or page with forms) take more time and effort than others, so a per page price makes no sense.
I agree with rumblepup......per page is not a fair way to price your work......not fair to you, and sometimes not fair to your client.
I try to sometimes raise my rates to semi price myself out of a project, but this often backfires and clients are sometimes more easy to sign up. It's crazy, but you should try it.
P.S. when a client comes to you via a referral from a previous client of yours, it will be hard to price yourself out of the business......generally they know the rates you charged the referring client. In this case, I usually go up 30% on average.
If you think I'm crazy, wait till you, my friend, are working 7 days a week and average of 10 to 14 hours a day, then tell me you don't want to raise your rates.
My company charges $400 an hr for the technical work I do for their clients (technical consulting).....and believe you me, those clients are getting a bargain. I can usually save 20%typical project price I look at, and it seldom takes me more than 1-5 hours to do the analysis and revisions. On an $80,000 project that is a $16,000 savings. For the record, I have saved my clients more money than that in many circumstances.
However, I have more clients than I can handle inside the company I work for (I do outside work for the $50/$75 hr).......and I am thinking of going to a 5 hour/$2000 minimum.