David’s Thoughts

As far as approaching an estimate… Well, you need to break the project down into some sort of manageable pieces. Most projects for me have mostly the same big pieces, but there are always something different about each one too.

Here’s the way I usually break down an estimate for a new site project

- planning & research
- graphic design (photoshop/gimp)
- frontend coding
- backend coding (cms integration)
- any special features or add-ons
- client consultation, support and training.

If you are planning on entering a lot of the content yourself, add a section for that - “content entry”.

Now, I may not list ALL of those when presenting the estimate to the client. If I think they’ll balk at the idea of having to pay me to do planning, I’ll just pad the other items with time from my Planning section.

See the comments on this post:
http://david.thelaniers.net/2006/12/how-do-i-invoice-for-good-planning.html
Interesting is the ADDIE method
Analysis/Discovery/Design/Implementation/Evaluation
You could use those as the primary categories for your estimates.
I know that’s way too much detail for probably most projects, but it’s good to have it rattling in the back of your mind somewhere. - that there’s more to the work, than just Design and Implementation.

So, as far as pricing based on the number of pages, I would just keep that info (the number of pages) as something that clues you in to how much work will be involved in the other categories… how many variations of the design, how flexible should the backend of the CMS be, how many special features, etc etc.

I would definitely recommend using a CMS. It’s not as crucial to use a CMS when all of your design is controlled by a CSS file. But the benefit of using a CMS comes when you want more flexibility - including allowing users to update their own content, and changing the HTML structure (site-wide, or just for a section).

You’re talking to a moderate CMS junkie here, so I would probably use some sort of a CMS for even 5-page site.

CMSs to consider

I have very limited knowledge regarding all of these except typo3, with which I’m very familiar.

CMS Made Simple - if you’ve never dug into a CMS before, and you need something that mimics how you’d normally think of a site, this is the one for you. Pages, Content, HTML Templates, CSS files. To me, it all makes sense, just by looking around. And it’s extremely well-suited to making clean frontend code.

If you have a little more time to learn and explore, there are some others you might consider.

Textpattern - probably the most highly revered CMS among coders and people who like clean code. To me, it’s a lot like CMSMadeSimple, but TXP is a bit more data-centered instead of page-centered. It might be more flexible in that way, since you can output that data however you want.

ExpressionEngine - I probably know the least about this one. But it seems to be very well supported, and well-liked. It’s definitely in the top CMSs list. It’s a commercial product, but there’s a free version for Personal and non-profit use.

modX - it’s pretty new. looks very powerful.

TYPO3 - the granddaddy. probably the most complex, and the most powerful. Allow a month to learn it. And find a tutor and ask questions.
typo3.com - overview info
typo3.org - for site developers

final note: This post began as an email to a colleague. Then I realized that others might benefit from these thoughts as well, so here you go!