[jamz]

Hello all,

I am interested in developing some freelance web sites for some friends and people I know. I just had a few questions as I am still quite new and would love to hear from some experienced web developers.

First off, I want to know how pricing works. I understand that this totally depends on the size of the project. But some examples to base off of would be helpful.
For example, a very simple catalog type site that consists of information about the business and pages that display images and information about their products. No flash is necessary for this and a basic design is already provided. How much is typically charged for a project of this size? What if features such as blogging and CMS are added to the project?

My second question is about web hosting. Since my friends aren't too knowledgeable about web technologies they have decided to leave this in my hands. Any suggestions of good web hosts for me to look into? I checked out godaddy.com and looked into the basic packages as they seem sufficient for the project, what are your opinions on this option?

I may have more questions in the near future. Hope you all can provide me with some answers. Thanks in advance!

[Big Mac]

I suppose you really need to price your local and online competition for the services you offer. Most people like to deal with a flat fee when purchasing web development services. The central question is, how much are you going to deliver in terms of your time and technology, and how much are the potential customers willing to pay?

As for hosting, yes Godaddy does offer basic but reliable hosting at cheap prices. I was going to host our corporate site with Godaddy. It was recommended by our web design partner as a potential host over some other popular low-cost providers, but then they came up with something far more competitive than even Godaddy could provide.

[besson3c]

What you should charge should reflect how much time it would take for you to do the job, but you should discount this if you feel like you would be learning on the job so that your rates are relatively competitive. Try to estimate your total workload if you didn't have to learn anything new.

Your host should support the languages you wish to use, and SSH support is immensely useful for mounting your home directory, using Git (I would check to see if it is preinstalled), downloading libraries straight to the server, syncing directories, checking on load/uptime, using SFTP rather than insecure FTP, etc. SSH access is an absolute requirement for me.