How much does a web designer make an hour?

My family paid a web designer to make a small business page and the facebook and twitter links both go back to?

• The F for facebook and T for Twitter on the web page we paid $1400 for both go to the web designers own pages, all the photos that was taken, submitted and added to the page at our request are in what we think may be spanish when you hover over or click on them, and the web designer has put his own link to contact him at the bottom of our page as well. Is any of this legal? What can we do?

• Answer:

  Jeez! $1400 for a web page - he's taken you for a ride there! I charge at most £200 for a web site and that includes full set up and hosting and one domain name. $1400 you should be getting proper decent service for that. The facebook and twitter links should be set up right to go to your facebook and twitter pages, not his own. As for your pictures in Spanish are you sure it's not Latin - "Lorem ipsum" is just a filler for when the person is producing a demo site, he should have changed it to the text you requested. You could try going to the following <sitename>/administrator e.g. www.mysite.co.uk/administrator or www.mysite.co.uk/admin and then see if you can login with any username or password he's give you. From there you should be able to edit it yourself and replace the text on the pictures. He's most probably used a CMS like Joomla to create the site which if you want to change it as long as you know the username and password for the back end then you should have no problem. As for the link to contact him, that is normal for webdesigners, normally it's positioned right at the bottom with the text such as "Site design by <company name>". One of your biggest problems you may face is if he is a cowboy web designer (which charging $1400 just to install Joomla and put a few images up there and just use default text certainly does sound like that's the case, he may be a bit reluctant to give you your domain name back. I always make sure my clients have full control over their domain names and are free to take them to anyone other hosting, but some web design companies are known to be very ruthless and try and control the domain name. One more thing if you get to the administration section of the site if he has been really lazy and not bothered setting it up right you might find that the username is admin and the password is also admin. And one final thing - if he's sold you a website built with Joomla (or any of the other GPL CMS's like Drupal, Wordpress, Mambo, etc) for $1400 he may be in breach of GPL licencing. He can charge a reasonable amount for work put into the site such as time spent setting it up, designing the template (if it's his own template - again many templates on Joomla are also under GPL licencing), but if it's Joomla he is not allowed to charge you for that software as that's not his to sell, and Joomla is licensed under GPL licencing.