website charges

[yklxmas]

Hiya,I've just started a project for a company and have absolutely no idea how much I should charge them for. The technique I use/will be using involve php and mysql. Can anyone suggest how to charge, please?Many thanks in advance

[justsomeguy]

Try and estimate the time you will spend creating it, and work out an hourly rate that you want to get paid, and quote them the total price.

[aspnetguy]

I personally like to charge a flat fee for the whole job. I find that clients are also happier with this method.It may take some time to accurately estimate how much time it will take you and then come up with a price.For example if a job was going to take me approx 25 hours and I charge them $45/hour I would quote them a price of $1150.The amount you charge should also reflect the amount of experience you have. Early on in your career you may need to charge less to get some jobs under your belt.

[justsomeguy]

Also, make sure to get at least some of the money up front. Ask them for one third before you start, another third halfway through, and the final piece when you are finished.

[boen_robot]

Besides the things already mentioned, I think one should also consider the average richness of the people in your area. If a price of ~$50/h is just too much for your customers, even if we assume you have a lot of knowledge and experience, you'll get less (if any) jobs in this area.For example, for my first (and only for now) project, I took a flat fee of 50 BGN which is about 25 euros (calculate the USD yourself). The project was somehow big and included a creation of very innovative things that similar sites have never thought of using. I could have asked for a lot more then what I got, but the circumstances didn't allowed me more:1. The person is a regular customer of the PC assembling shop I work in with my father. Because of that, he knows I'm just beginning to create web sites. I can't even "lie" I'm a professional.2. The creation of the whole thing took about 3 weeks. The used files were 2 images, 5 XMLs, 3 XSLTs, 2 CSS and 2 PHP files. Total of 13 files. Though very flexible and scalable, it simply doesn't look impressive at the beginning, scince there's only a sample content. Not to mention that the speed/qunatity ratio just sounds funny. I mean 6 files (XMLs are just content, images weren't my creations and the PHPs are ~40 almost identical lines of code) for 21 days? How could I ask for more?But most importantly:3. A professional web design company takes a flat fee of about 200 BGN (100 euros) for "small" projects like this one (small becase MySQL is not involved) or something like 5-10 BGN/h for all sizes. If professionals take that much, I as a newbie in terms of marketing can't take that much. And even when I do reach professionalism, I won't be able to get more then that, scince clients will go to those people instead of me. It's just the trend... people either get the cheapest or if they want to look "cool"- the most expensive (thinking this always means the biggest quality, when it truth it only means the most eyecandy).

[Skemcin]

Here are some posts to review:http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=5336http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=7781http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=3718These might give you some more insight.