Need someone who can help me calculate the price of a job.

[Jumpy09]

As the Subject states I am looking for someone who has been in PHP coding for a while and could give me an estimate on how much a project I just did is worth to someone with a bit more experience than me.

 

I am basically looking to see how much someone else would have charged for it, so I can feel comfortable quoting the price I want for it.

 

If you do coding for a living, this is your actual job, then leave a message and I will send you details.  I am kind of rushed for time at the moment and if I get some free time I will post more information on here.

 

The URL : The Site

Yes I did the theme.  I'm not 100% content with it, but the client loves it.

[Nodral]

In the UK you're looking at about £200 per day

[WebStyles]

in Portugal I charge €45 / hour

 

 

[Jumpy09]

At the time I didn't have anything to do so I spent about 12 hours a day working on it.

 

The issue is I am not what you could consider Professional, even though my code looks and performs great.  I have issues where I may end up miscoding portions and spend the better part of 2 hours trying to figure out what I did wrong.

 

Is it good practice to charge for bumps in the road, even if you happen to be the source of it?

 

I spent 3 days working on it about a month ago, and 3 more days working on it going back from yesterday.  A good 12 hours per day, so that would be 72 hours spent.  This includes finding the 2 Commercial Use Scripts I have and then trying to merge them into the script.  Also ended up with one image uploader, which ended up being more of a pain than it was worth so I went and got a different one.  Customer didn't have much to say about the layout of the site, or the content.  I kind of had to research a bit of his field to populate a few starting pages and take the images he had on Facebook to run through the uploader.

 

Contains : Page Creation / Edit / List , Album Creation / List , Image Upload / Move between Albums/ Deletion , and is all locked behind a pretty secure log-in with MathGuard as a bot prevention system.  Passwords are incredibly secure, salts used, and even used a Database Script that my friend gave to me a while back.

 

If I wouldn't have run into any hiccups, I could have been complete in 36 hours.  So if I charged $25 an hour, that would be $900.

From the looks of the site, is it worth $900?

 

I don't want to feel like I am ripping them off, but I do need the money.  So I am trying to justify that I want at least $600.

[Nodral]

The best way is to factor that in.  Nobody's perfect!!

 

I don't actually work in coding but in my day to day job I occasionally make errors which I have to correct, however I don't get my wages docked because of these errors.

 

You'll never get your code right first time, hence the phrase debugging!!!  you always have to factor some time in for debugging and UAT testing before you will produce the desired results for a client.

 

[Jumpy09]

The best way is to factor that in.  Nobody's perfect!!

 

I don't actually work in coding but in my day to day job I occasionally make errors which I have to correct, however I don't get my wages docked because of these errors.

 

You'll never get your code right first time, hence the phrase debugging!!!  you always have to factor some time in for debugging and UAT testing before you will produce the desired results for a client.

 

I completely understand, although I feel that most coders wouldn't make as many errors.  Like missing ;, which are easy to fix, but I really need to start putting in die ( "Something to tell me where this is " ) ; to make my debugging easier.  Unfortunately I am still aiming for the day I can blind code and get it right the first time lol.

 

I would put myself between Novice and Professional, maybe a bit more toward Novice, so would $25 an hour be a good price for that skill level?  Or am I under selling myself?

[Maq]

I fixed the link in your original post, you had one too many http's.  Also, the CSS doesn't seem to be loading on your site.

[Nodral]

Ask them for $900.  You can then negotiate and if you have to drop a couple of hundred dollars you'll still get what you want.

 

Sounds like you need a business partner to run the monetary side while you bash your keyboard!!!

[Jumpy09]

I fixed the link in your original post, you had one too many http's.  Also, the CSS doesn't seem to be loading on your site.

 

I am using long expiry cache, and ended up editing the CSS.  I changed the name of the CSS and I thought I changed it in the head.  I'll get right on that, thank you for the heads up.

 

Changed it.  I cleared my cache and it still loads for me, so hopefully I actually fixed that.  The page system uses it's own head content to populate the title and keywords.  I did it a bit weird to suit the particular situation, I'm sure I could have done the system a bit better.

 

Thank you again.

 

I could use a Business Partner, but it is just freelance at the moment.  If I ever get another job I am going to definitely figure out the estimated price before hand and make sure both parties like it.  This one was sprung on me, and I just went with it.

[DeX]

I'd charge $2000 - $2500 for that here in Canada, including the lightbox.

 

Why do you have all the pages loading from index.php instead of their own separate PHP page? Actually why is the owners.php page the only one that is separate?

[Jumpy09]

I'd charge $2000 - $2500 for that here in Canada, including the lightbox.

 

Why do you have all the pages loading from index.php instead of their own separate PHP page? Actually why is the owners.php page the only one that is separate?

 

Because the pages are implemented in the database and then populated depending on the ?page= string.

 

This was done so that he could access the admin area and alter pages, but due to the size of the image on owners.. I couldn't get the image to work right with the system that uses a 4:3 Aspect Ratio on images.  That was done to make the images look more professionally inserted, instead of having the images come up to different sizes and looking weird.

 

I could have done it better, but since the client doesn't know anything about html or knows how to work FTP.. I did the site in the best way possible to allow him to add pages, remove pages, edit pages, and such.  Which would be a bit difficult to do if the pages were loaded via their own .php file.

 

I am not very good at coding the htaccess file so I don't know how to make a www.site.com/page  url to be www.site.com/index.php?page=page when working with it in php.  If I could figure that out, then I could at least make the pages appear to be different.

[KevinM1]

Not to be harsh, but I wouldn't pay more than $500 for that site.  It looks amateurish to me (which, to be fair, it should, given your admitted skill level).  The theme is very dark, especially for a business, and the navigation is odd.  The drop down menus don't seem to align properly, and they feel cramped.  For some reason, there's two pages for 'Contact Us' and 'Contact Form'.  They can be consolidated.

 

A lot of it just looks like raw HTML.  Bulleted lists everywhere, Times New Roman font....  From a design standpoint, this really should be your first draft, not your final draft.

 

Getting paid as a freelancer is more than just the time you put in.  It's ultimately about quality.  Without being able to see what you did for the admin area, I just don't see $900 worth of value here.

[DeX]

I'd charge $2000 - $2500 for that here in Canada, including the lightbox.

 

Why do you have all the pages loading from index.php instead of their own separate PHP page? Actually why is the owners.php page the only one that is separate?

 

Because the pages are implemented in the database and then populated depending on the ?page= string.

 

This was done so that he could access the admin area and alter pages, but due to the size of the image on owners.. I couldn't get the image to work right with the system that uses a 4:3 Aspect Ratio on images.  That was done to make the images look more professionally inserted, instead of having the images come up to different sizes and looking weird.

 

I could have done it better, but since the client doesn't know anything about html or knows how to work FTP.. I did the site in the best way possible to allow him to add pages, remove pages, edit pages, and such.  Which would be a bit difficult to do if the pages were loaded via their own .php file.

 

I am not very good at coding the htaccess file so I don't know how to make a www.site.com/page  url to be www.site.com/index.php?page=page when working with it in php.  If I could figure that out, then I could at least make the pages appear to be different.

 

So why not use Wordpress? It would have been much easier for you and give him a much better admin area for adding pages.

[Jumpy09]

Without getting into my life story, yes the design is a bit amateur looking and I could have done a better job over all.  I also could have done the entire thing in a third of the time I actually spent on the stupid thing.

 

I have problems concentrating on things and connecting thoughts completely.  I don't always catch things I should, and if I could carry out a complete enough brainstorming session the navigation menu would have been redesigned.  I don't see any alignment issues, and I have no problems with the Times New Roman font.  I honestly don't think anyone other than designers have a problem with it, and I never said I was a designer.  I just happened to be thrown into the design portion, and I prefer PHP.. because you don't really have to worry about how you are going to display stuff.

 

Overall the client is really happy with the website, he found it a lot more intriguing than I happened to of, suggested the block background and doesn't want me to get rid of the three image theme that is on it.

 

Index.php is coded to get the content from the database, depending on the "Page Layout" it will then decide what CSS code and base Template to give the pages to render the pages in 3 different layouts... all by just choosing 0 , 1, or 2.  The Admin can select how many Paragraphs to display on the page, due to the client not knowing html the content in the paragraphs are put into <p></p> tags to render on the page properly.  The Admin can choose up to 10 images to display and depending on the amount of images depends on the size of the images and how they are displayed.  For the layout where the images are on top of the content, the images are laid out differently than with the images on the sides of the content.

 

The PHP behind the html is a beauty and I put a good deal of work into it, granted as I mentioned before.. I do not have the concentration to brainstorm adequately and most likely spent more time on it than I should have.

 

When you are creating or editing the page the images are broken down between virtual albums, to give a bit of organization to the images.  When you select the album and click on "Select Image" a modal window pops up with the images in that album ( paginated to 25 images per page ) and when you select the image it populates the input field with the Image name and extension.

 

If I wanted to do anymore work on the thing I would set it up with an Admin Account that had view privileges only and couldn't actually process any requests, but I have a feeling the client won't even like a $500 price.. despite the fact he already got 2 jobs off the website.

 

His clients even seem to like the website, which makes me feel good about myself.  I have a lot of room to improve and the reason why I was looking for help calculating a price is because I understand I am not all that professional and still have a good ways to go to even be able to claim it.

 

I thank everyone for their responses, even the criticism.  You can never improve if people never call you out on your flaws.

 

Honestly I spent a good 72 hours on this thing, most of it was combating my inability to blind code efficiently and I had to go in and fix a lot of stuff.  Integrating some scripts was a bit of a hassle, but because I have the concentration problem I do not want to charge for a 72 hour job.  I cut the hours down to 36, even though most professionals could have done it in 24 or less, and instead of charging a ton for each hour I went for $18.05 an hour.  Which even some novice coders could see $25 an hour for coding, and professionals could see upwards of $100+ so I feel the price of $650 is justifiable .. simply because of some of the responses I got.

[Ninjakreborn]

That price seems fair. You get the money, plus the experience.