ASP.Net Website quote

Question

I am new to creating websites for people on a money-earning basis.. I created my Dads website for my final year project, and he will pay me eventually but obviously I cant charge him as much as anyone else.

I have just been to a trade show where I picked up 1 definite and 2 possible sites to do. The definite one is as follows:

They want a site which:

• Has a catalogue for the customer to view, as well as being able to order products at a retail price.
• Has an administrative section with order tracking, catalogue management and page view stats.
• Has other basic pages such as Contact Us, Terms etc (all the usual).
• Enables customers to post comments about items, as well as manage their accounts (addresses, payment details etc).
• Is linked up to sage pay or paypal (or something similar).

My task is to design this site from scratch and launch it for them. They already have the hosting sorted out, so no need to worry about that in the quote. I am planning on using .net and SQL Server, if this makes any difference.

Basically what I would like is to get some quotes for what other people would charge if they were given the task. Can anyone help me out with this, or give me some hints as to where I could go to get quotes?

Answer 1

Pro tip: you rarely build an entire site from scratch any more. You do things like find a generic storefront that you can customize to get the look and feel you want. Search for asp.net storefront or asp.net e-commerce and you'll find many options that will do much better than you could hope to going it alone.

Answer 2

What I typically do is create an Excel spreadsheet and list out each task I think the project will require. Once I have that, I'll go through again and possibly split tasks up into small tasks. Then I'll go through each task and estimate the number of hours I think it'll take to complete each task. Once you have a number of hours, add 15% and multiply by your normal hourly rate. As you're new to this, you probably don't know what that is, and it will be significantly less than those who have been doing it for many years.

Estimating and quoting are difficult things to learn and there is never a real "right" way to do it. This is just what I do. HTH.