Hello,

I have been asked by my old Headteacher to go back to my old school to design a new school website.

As well as designing the website's look, the whole website will be a custom-made CMS coded myself in PHP.

The current plan has around 60 pages planned (yes, a lot of information) and my work will involve asking the

appropriate staff to write the content, type it up if it is handwritten, and put it into the website. For current

documents like the Prospectus, School Policies, Newsletters, Letters to Parents, etc I will have to proof read and

omit sensitive information and then convert to PDF and upload.

For each curricular subject, the department will have it's own area, where the current staff listing and their

photographs will feature, along with information on the courses that the department runs, and the facility for

teachers in that department to upload files for pupils and parents to view/download.

I am also responsible for taking photographs and editing them if necessary to make them suitable for use on the web,

recording the names of everyone in the photograph in order to write to their parents seeking permission, in line

with the school's Child Protection policy.

The whole website is expected to be finished within around 6 weeks, and I may work from home or within the school

premises.

The hosting and domain name are being sorted and are not my concern.

My headteacher has asked me to come back with a reasonable price for this sort of work.

My question is, what would be deemed "reasonable" for the amount of work detailed above?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Danny

I have seen groups that solely create adn code skins charge $50 an hour, and as this looks to be a lot more work than just a skin that would probably be a fair price. As the school is probably not going to be willing to pay that much you may be able to get $25/hour. (I have been asked to build a website for my school, but as soon as I asked what they were thinkin about paying for it they ran the other way: schools tend to be cheap asses).

I have built a simple 15 page site (strictly skin and content, no server side stuff) in about 20 hours (from start to customer (sadly it was volunteer) being happy). As you are looking at 60+ pages and server side coding involved as well you will probably have to deal with at least 30-40 hours of work (I am figuring that once you get the templating and everything finished in php it will take a lot less time to use database inserted content, assuming you are allowed the use of a database). So I would say a fair price (and probably a bit cheap) would be between $750 and $1000. You would be able to easily make (or, if they refuse this next price they are just ripping you off and you don't want the work anyway) $300. I would try for closer to the $700s myself for a project of this magnitude.

Schools really do like to exploit their students skills on projects like these. Stick to your guns and a decent wage. If they insist on being cheap, then the gig wasn't worth it anyways. Cheap gigs like that also tend to be way more work than they are worth anyhow.

I would charge 25-35 an hour and if they bite, great. Otherwise forget it. Especially if they want a CMS. Those are not the easiest things to setup and you should be well compensated for it. After all if they had to buy one off the shelf, they would be dishing out thousands of dollars or have to go with an open source solution.