I fear that I am often underbid by way of my own honest quotes. So I want to make it clear how I make a quote, and what my quote means.

I make quality sites, and I assume you want a quality site. I don't give a quote for a prototype unless I make very clear I'm talking about a prototype. I usually will expect to create maintenance interfaces which increase initial cost, but increase future quality and reduce future maintenance costs. Even a single-page brochure site needs a little something like this, so you don't have to go through me everytime you want to announce a sale or show or change your hours.

I also plan for extra time. It takes me a certain amount of time to make the initial site. It takes as much as twice as much time to take the initial -- fully functional -- site to completion. You'll have design changes. There will be bugs to work out. You might change some of what you want to do. I don't know what all these things will be, but I know they exist. If everything went wrong, it would take ten times as long to finish the site. But everything doesn't go wrong, however something always does go wrong.

In some cases I can't make any quote at all. Without a clear definition of the site I can't commit to anything. And often you won't have a very clear idea of what you want.

One of the reasons that you are unlikely to have a clear idea of what you want is because you won't understand how the process works, and what the relative costs of different things are. I don't blame you for this -- if understood all these things, you very well might do it yourself. I try to explain the process as best I can. But there will often be compromises you'll want to make when you understand the relative costs. Coming up with a real plan, and a real quote, involves you and I discussing these compromises.

If you have a very well-defined project in mind, or something with which I am very familiar, I can give you a fixed price for the job. This works well for me, because I am free to build my own inventory of tools as I create your project, and I don't have to distinguish between work done for myself, and work done for you. This works well for you because you have a fixed price that you can count on.