Web Design Prices

Prices for Web Design in the Puget Sound area seem to cover the map. High school wizards will do a 4 page site for $400, but is a hastily assembled site, clearly built from a template in Word or Front Page the image you want to present to the world?. Some of the large established firms in Seattle and Tacoma won't consider your ideas for under $4000. Prime Web Design in Olympia has an online Web Site cost calculator that is a real eye opener to the world of Professional Web Design. With so many people calling themselves Web Designers, your safest bet is to find a Designer of quality Web Sites with whom you can establish a personal working relationship. Technical expertise is immediately visible in a Web Site. What is equally important but more intangible is the communication skills of your Designer. You and your Designer will be spending some time together. Your Designer must be able to listen carefully and patiently to your ideas and ask probing questions.

My goal as a Web Designer is to create an eye catching site that will help you reach your target audience. My most important skills are my experience and my ability to combine a fresh, creative mind with technical expertise. Many Designers, myself included can write flawless html, Javascript and create stunning Flash intros. My advantage is my ability to see the big picture. I listen to your needs and custom design your site in such a way that you communicate exactly who you are to your potential clients using the far reaching power of the Internet. To view the kind of work I am capable of, visit my Interfaces page. If you like what you see, contact me. We can meet over a Latte for a no obligation discussion of your needs.

Painting Prices

Framed and double matted with regular glass

My landscapes sell for $300 to $380 in the 15x20 sheet size framed 20x26 with a 3 1/2 inch matt.
The 10x15 size sell for $200 to $300.
The 7 1/2x10 size sells for $100 to $200.
My framed prints sell for $80 in an 11x14 frame.
My postcards sell for $1.25 each.
For an unframed painting subtract $30 to $70 depending on the frame.

Pricing Essay

I have been asked, "How do you price your paintings?" Pricing your paintings is something that comes with experience. A painting is only worth what someone will pay for it. When I first started painting in 1988 I gave away my work to anyone who was nice. Consequently all of my friends and relatives have at least one of my early paintings. I noticed however that people don't appreciate art very much when it is free. They don't bother to frame it, for example. As I got better and began to win a couple awards in juried shows I priced my work around one or two hundred dollars and it sold. I sold a half a dozen in that price range. I started to notice that my best pieces sold very quickly. I began raising the price on the best piece in a group to $300 with the others priced lower depending on how much I liked them. The worst thing an artist can do when starting out is to overprice his art. It is a supply and demand kind of thing. If you can't keep up with the demands of your gallery, raise your prices a little but try not to scare away the collectors. I have heard it said that a painting hanging on someone's wall is the best advertisement money can't buy.

Like most artists, I do three or four "bad" paintings for every "good" one. Some artists have a reputation for selling paintings directly to their collectors at a discount from the gallery prices. This is always a bad idea. Artists need galleries as much as galleries need artists. There is no logic in stabbing your gallery in the back. My galleries can reach a far larger audience than I can on my own. Having a gallery sell my paintings for me frees me to do what I do best which is paint. Galleries have professional art sales people who can do skillful advertising and bring in the collectors. Plus the collectors can come to the galleries and browse a wide variety of art from different artists. They don't have to worry about whether the artist is in or if he is in a good mood or if he currently has any finished pieces.

The gallery/ artist arrangement is a mutually beneficial relationship. I know a few artists who sell there own work successfully but they are portrait painters who work on commission through word of mouth and that is a whole different kettle of fish from landscape painting. Selling a painting is like fishing. You put your bait in the water and hope a trout swims buy and likes it. Sometimes the bait is bad. Sometimes the bait is good but you are using the right bait in the wrong location. Even after finding good homes for over 50 paintings and drawings I still am a terrible judge of what is a marketable piece. I have taken pieces that I absolutely loved into my gallery. The gallery loved the paintings. The collectors loved the paintings. Heck, my wife even liked them and she doesn't like art. The work did not sell and I eventually brought them home. On the other hand, I have sat on paintings that I thought were failures for months. When I told my gallery that all I had were a couple bad ones available, they said, "Bring them down, let us look at them". I framed one of them, took it down there and it sold in under twenty four hours. Go figure! On the other hand, I have three boxes of paintings, probably fifty pounds worth, under my bed that are almost certainly "bad" paintings. I guess I should call them "learning experiences"

Occasionally I will put a painting in a couple galleries and shows that I think is good and it will not sell. This applies especially to still lifes. I sell twenty landscapes for every still life I sell. I figure that if my galleries can't sell a piece after a good long try, it is either a bad piece or needs to find that rare collector for whom it is a perfect fit. This is the only time I will lower the price on a painting. If my galleries have been unable to sell a painting ,I figure the "A painting is only worth what someone will pay for it" rule applies. I have found good homes for a number of paintings this way. People who know me and discover that I paint occasionally ask to see a few of my pieces. Low and behold, a piece that I thought was unsellable suddenly sells! I usually have a few framed pieces that are on the long slide down to being unframed and stored in the box under the bed. By no means does this mean they are always bad paintings. I have just gotten so tired of looking for the right buyer that I have to move on and switch a painting into the frame that might have a better chance of selling since I get better with each painting I do. (This is one of the few good things about growing old) At that point I am open to negotiation on the price of a painting. However, I always take my best work to my galleries first since they have the best chance of reaching the widest market and making the sale. Plus, my galleries, State of the Arts and the Huff Gallery are really nice people and I like doing business with them. They are true patrons of the arts.

NOTE: this is my old site and is no longer maintained. My new site is here.