Help with a quote...

[Gibble]

I've been contacted about writing a simple lodging/booking website for a company.

Basically, they enter that they have 10 rooms at hotel X for Jan 1,2,3

Then as the rooms are booked they mark them off the list.

I'm not quite sure how in depth this goes yet...

But, given that, what would you think is a reasonable number of hours to create and amount to charge.

I'm just starting out freelancing and this is my first real project on my own...

[Gibble]

Anybody?

[txbakers]

I find these types of quotes very difficult to make.

I've learned to guess very high, and always round up.

You know your skill level and how fast you make pages. What would you be doing differently for this site? I allow as long as it takes to make the page for testing. (with database applications).

So, a 10 page site, which would take me 50 hours, I would quote 100 hours.

[john_k]

One of the tricks in estimating is to get enough information from the client (discovery) to make an accurate quote without making this discovery into its own billable project. In a perfect world, that is exactly what you would do. (If you can get the client to go with this, it really will work out best for both of you).

One way to do that, by the way, is to not come out and call it a separate project. Simply include it as part of your quote with the stipulation that after the discovery is done, you will determine if the scope of the project has changed and make adjustements to your estimate accordingly.

If you can bill strictly on a "time and materials" basis, you should do that. Unfortunately, for most clients, that looks like you are asking for a blank check. This is more so for small clients and/or clients that have never outsourced IT programming before. What you need to help them understand is that, since they aren't telling you everything they need (because they probably don't know), you can't possibly know precisely how much work is going to be involved.

Imagine asking someone to build a house without knowing how many bedrooms, floors, or fireplaces you want. Then ask for a fixed bid. That is what a lot of clients want to do with IT development.

What you can know, from one or more interview sessions with the client, is the scope of work that is involved. It sounds like you know some of that already, but not all of it. Sit down with them for another hour or two to walk through some specifics. Couple that with your skill level(s) that will be applied to the work to get an idea of how much time is involved.

Another key to accurate estimates is to break down the tasks as much as possible. For the site you describe, you will need to at least perform graphics creation and editing, html, javascript, some type of programming (cgi/perl/php/asp/.net), and data modeling. Depending on where/how the site is hosted, you may need to get into some of the systems aspects.

For each page that will exist on the site, determine if it is chiefly static, db-read, and/or db-write. Static pages should take the least amount of programming time (who's doing the copy-writing though?), while those that write to the database should take the most work.

And, as the earlier reply stated, you know your strengths and weaknesses best. So it is pretty difficult for an outsider to estimate how many hours of work it is going to take you do complete the site.

Oh yeah, one other thing, make sure you differentiate between hours/days of work to compete the project and calendar days for the project duration. If you quote 50 hours to the client, make sure they know that this means 2 calendar weeks (or whatever your plan is).

I'm sure you've thought of a lot of this (I kind of rambled), but hopefully some of it will help.

[Gibble]

It all helps, like I said, I'm new to the freelance world.