It would teach me enough info to build a great site and sell it as a service.
No it won't. In fact no course I have come across will give you enough knowledge to be able to sell Wordpress Website creation as a service. The amount involved cannot be contained or learned in a few lessons on Lynda.com for example.
How much do you charge to build a basic Wordpress.org site for a client? Here's my dilemma.
I don't want to sound harsh, but herein lies your problem and the reason why you should not at this stage be looking at providing this service. From your post I am afraid I don't get the feeling that you are fully aware of the involvement in creating a website and therefore unable to offer this as a valid service.
To do it
properly, and I assume you want to give the best service you can to your clients, you will need to ascertain their needs. You cannot put a price on your service until this fundamental part of the procedure is completed. This obviously happens way before you talk about the aesthetics.
Yes, there are people out there doing 5 page Wordpress websites for pennies, but lets be honest, all they are doing is installing it and a theme and inputting the content they are given. A monkey could do this and this is definitely
NOT what the client wants. They may go with this type of service due to the cost, but to be honest, these are not the clients you want anyway as they want everything for nothing.
You need to ascertain with the client if they need a website or a platform. You need to talk about future usage as the template you decide on now may not work with the feature list they want to implement down the line. You need to talk fonts and colour, to get ideas of styles and functionality they have seen elsewhere and only then, when you have a fully written plan which your client can sign off, can you look at building it for them.
Then there is the build section....Wordpress settings, template configuration, vustome page buidin (as they will want some widget placed somewhere unorthadox - believe me! - so that will need manual page building), several font and colour changes, SEO implementation and content generation with SEO firmly in mind.
The there is the handover, training so that the client can update it themselves, content updates and changes, marketing, Wordpress updates, backups and security fixes (which may or may not break your template and plugins - so you need an offline development area to test it before you go live on the clients site) ongoing SEO, hosting issues......
The list is virtually endless and you should really know as much as you can about
ALL of the elements....
So, how do you put a price on this?
It is very individual, with a price calculated on a case by case basis. Take $500 as a rough guide (and that is very cheap!), and that is just for the initial setup. At $25 an hour (which is what I feel a basic WP install service is worth) you are looking at 20 hours work.
3-4 Hours for prep and consultation with the client.
3-4 hours for installation and setup of WP, the theme, child theme configuration etc. (this will reduce as you get more accustomed with the software)
1-2 hours for basic SEO implementation and Google Analytics setup
3-4 hours for the uploading of content and moving tings around to the clients likes (more if you have to generate the content yourself)
3-4 hours for handover and training to show the client how to update and add additional content
1-2 hours for general amendments
That does not take into account issues after the handover, phone calls for advice etc, it all needs to be costed in the first place.
My advice is that unless you are going to tackle the above and do it properly, you might as well not do it at all.
but is it more worth it than buying a book on Amazon on the same topic and working my way through that?
Neither a course or a book will teach you the above. This comes with lots of experience and reading / learning. It also means keeping on top of it as it changes daily.
You are right, it is a skill that is in demand at the moment (and will be for the foreseeable future). The reason for this is that it is just not something that can be picked up over the weekend. If you want to do it properly you will find that just the initial and ongoing learning alone will consume your business operations and time and is therefore not something that you should be going into lightly.
That said if you have the time and energy to learn it all, you can make decent money from it.
