Hi, I've stumbled upon an opportunity for some freelance work. This is my first experience in not only freelance work but actually charging for a website.

 

I had a meeting with my client yesterday and they will be sending me a brief early next week with the details, however I was wondering if the web designer forum could help me out in terms of how I should price my fee.

 

From the meeting we had it seems as though they will be having 5 main pages of their site, with roughly 5 more sub pages deeper in so we're looking at around about a 10-15 page website. They want to be able to update it whenever they want so this will also require it to be CMS based.

 

There is a girl currently working there who designs graphics and she will be handing down the design to me to code, so I will not be doing the graphics for the site.

 

We agreed on a rough 6 weeks completion time (4 weeks to get it done and 2 for adjustments).

 

Any help or useful links would be greatly appreciated. I want to give them a fair price and not really go amazingly over the top with it, but I still want to be paid a fair amount for it too.

Judge roughly how long it will take you in hours.

 

Get an estimate of how much you want to be paid. Freelancers seem to take anything from £5 - £30 an hour.

 

Multiply the two.

 

so if it will take you 8 hours. and you want to charge £10 p/h (£80 so far).

 

Add extra £/hour for the adjustments charge about £100

I've done a bit of calculation on this and settled for charging £15 per hour due to me not being experienced enough to be considered professional, but experienced enough to get the job done for good quality within the time limit.

 

So at £15 per hour I've come up with what I will be doing and how long it will take me and a final price. Details below.

 

Rate £15/hour

Pages: 10-15

 

Client meetings/discussion – 2-3 hours

 

Content writing – 3 hours

 

Marking up content – 5-6 hours

 

Marking up for CMS – 5-6 hours

 

Javascript – 2 hours

 

Styling the content – 8 hours

 

Testing – 3 hours

 

Total hours: around 31

 

Total pay: around £465

 

Because I've never actually timed myself doing work so this is mostly guess-work I'm doing here, but I've tried to be as realistic as possible and it looks like a fair price for a 10-15 page site with CMS behind it.

 

What do you think? is it a fair price? am I charging too much? too little? Should I be taking more time things of less time on things? am I on the right lines here?

 

Any help again is much much appreciated.

Always add 10% contingency on. If you don't use it, knock it off the final client invoice (puts them in a better mood too ).

 

I've always added 15% onto my estimates, 9/10 times i've been able to refund it partially or fully, and all clients love being charged less than they expected

 

Also prioritise your workflow. JavaScript should be one of the last things you do, because if you run out of time, it can be added later, or completly cut (it's generally eye candy, not critical).

 

Where as cms integrations is critical, you can't cut time from there.

I am not sure whether 'Client meetings/discussion' hours are billiable but basically this calculation looks quite correctly.

Cheers for the help. I think the client meetings thing was more of a cost since they want me to be there, I'm essentially working for them and being paid to be there, I could be wrong though.

 

Thanks for your help, I'm glad a little bit of research into it paid off.