Undead_Hunter - 3:11 am on Mar 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

A few things:

1) Big companies that design for small business almost always charge "by the page", or rather by range of pages "ex. 2-5 pages is $500, 5-10 pages is $800" and so on. Verizon, WebSitePros.com, etc.

2) The problem with charging by the hour? The better you ARE, the LESS time it takes. So, do you start billing fewer hours because you're faster than you were at this last year? Or because you have more pre-existing code in place? Not if you want to stay in business.

We look at things from an outside perspective - "What could/should we be making in the marketplace right now?" There's two of us here, we took the total salary, added 50% for insurance/expenses, + another 10% profit, broke that down into daily/weekly/monthly. The end number will be MUCH higher than you expect. But its what you need.

We're in the middle of making REAL charts/work tables for how long things REALLY take - a huge mistake we seem to have made over and over is underestimating time - and that will help be a guide for how long new projects might take.

Very briefly, as I've mentioned before in other forums we've come to realize that 60% of our time is actually in finding and dealing with clients - only 40% "billable work". So you have to take that into account as well.