How to price a LARGE website. Your approach?

[noslenwerd]

Not sure if this the correct place to post this, but here goes.

I've been with my company for almost 2 years now, and we have never created a site much larger than 30-35 pages. We have a client who wants a site that is approx 80+ pages. We qualified them as much as possible via our Online Questionnaire, and have a call with them tomorrow for more details. But even then I feel its going to be pretty difficult to get a good estimate as to the hours involved.

Question is, what techniques/approaches do you and your company take to pricing very large websites?

Thanks!!

[webcosmo]

there are many things involved in this:
- how many pages you have to design
- do you have to create content or copy paste
- is there any dynamic feature on any of those pages. if so how much time they would take to develop

i personally think of it as how much time it would take me to do the job. then i do the math.

[Ted S]

When you're aproaching a site that's larger than what you're use to (all things are relative, 80 pages being large for you) it's important to look at what the abilities of scale are. Does the company really need 80 pages designed individually or is it a series of templates (homepage, about us, category, product page, landing page, etc) that you could design and then have someone build out into different versions at a much lower rate.

By the same virtue you need to think about the CMS. How does that scale? Are they asking for one? Should you be advising one (maintaining 80 pages manually is not a good idea).

And then you get into functionality... 80 static pages may be a much smaller build than 5 really functional, facebook connected, ecommerce driven pages. What is the work type? What are you doing? Do you have to outsource some of it and if so, at what cost?

[couponsitescript]

The cost of 30-35 pages site * x = the number of pages the client want to have on the site.
That will be a way.