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How much should a web developer and salesperson split the price?

Question by Chris Y: How much should a web developer and salesperson split the price?
One of my friends, who is a salesperson, got a deal for a website design project. He meets with the client, negotiates with them, draws up the contracts, and gets all the data/photos/content that I need. And since the website is to be in Japanese, he is also helping to do the translation work.

Me, well, I’m the web developer. I’m going to design everything from scratch, build the web templates, do all the coding, Flash animation, domain registration, server hosting set up, etc.

There will also be ongoing monthly payments from the client for maintenance and hosting fees…

It’s really difficult to decide where to split the money… 50/50? 60/40? 40/60? etc… We both want to be fair with each other because we’re real-life friends… but at the same time, we want to have a good business structure to avoid any miscommunications and to base possible future projects on.

Thanks in advance for all your input!

Best answer:

Answer by ogd_la_muerte_de_distribudores
I’m not a business major or anything, I’m a web designer and developer myself.

What it comes down to it really how much work he did and how much you did, fairly some people would say do a 50/50 split; but coding from scratch takes a lot of time and effort on your part, not to mention that translation also takes time as well; depending on how fluent they are this may not be a problem. There are two ways you can go and it really is depending on the fluency of the language skills.

If your friend is very fluent in Japanese then I say a 60/40 split where the 60 is going to you because that is a lot more work on you then what he has to do.

If translating Japanese comes a bit harder to your friend then I suggest 55/45 split where the 55% goes to you because your work load isn’t changing but his (or hers) is getting a little harder.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!