Eric it was more a comment on what you are charging. If you are a good designer you should charge more.

Fe said she charges $80 per hour and I suspect that is a bargain for her amazing skills. Don't under value your worth

Yes you are correct. I should take my own advice, which I often give others "your prices should reflect your abilities". I probably should charge more, but it allows me to maintain a strong competitive edge over my competition. But, like I said, this is also why I only charge by the hour for maintenance only. To do the actual web development I do packages. It is easier for me to gauge the price seeing the whole picture than it is the parts (by hour).

Thanks for the encouragement! You get a spidey dance.

hehe - i should remember that one next time my dad asks for some code

yep eric - i usually quote a whole package too for starters - but then for extras i'll say something like "thats not covered in the package - quoting 2 hours for that feature...."

I also usually do half price or free for NPO's - depending on who they are....

and Jellybean - IMO - EVERYONE needs php - even if its just for the site template so you dont need to type out the darn menu on every page every time you make a change - give it a go

I host most of my sites with a crowd called hosterio.com. Their plans start at 11 bucks US per year and these guys have everything already in place that any site could possibly need, all done using the Fantastico one-click installation system. For example, if you want a PHP/MySQL-based forum or shopping cart on your site, you just install one from a list of available scripts, which includes the following:

Blogs:
b2evolution, Nucleus, WordPress

Classifieds:
Noahs Classifieds

Content Management:
Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla 1.5, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, phpWCMS, phpWebSite, Siteframe, TYPO3, Xoops, Zikula

Customer Relationship:
Crafty Syntax Live Help, Help Center Live, osTicket, PerlDesk, PHP Support Tickets, Support Logic Helpdesk, Support Services Manager

Discussion Boards:
phpBB, SMF

E-Commerce:
CubeCart, OS Commerce, Zen Cart

F.A.Q.:
FAQMasterFlex

Hosting Billing:
AccountLab Plus, phpCOIN

Image Galleries:
4Images Gallery, Coppermine Photo Gallery

Mailing Lists:
PHPlist

Polls and Surveys:
Advanced Poll, LimeSurvey, phpESP

Project Management:
dotProject, PHProjekt

Site Builders:
Soholaunch Pro Edition, Templates Express

Wiki:
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware, PhpWiki

Other Scripts:
Dew-NewPHPLinks, Moodle, Open-Realty, OpenX, PHPauction, phpFormGenerator, WebCalendar

Extras:
Language, Side menu appearance, Email notifications, Installations overview

If you get all this for that kind of dough, it doesn't make sense to me to bother coding anything when it is all right there at the click of a mouse button. While it might not suit everyone, for the range of sites I work with I haven't found this hosting company wanting for anything.

This is not an advertisement and I am not affiliated with hosterio or get a kickback for signing anyone up, I only mention this as an option for setting up a reasonably-priced and turn-key site along with all the other ideas posted here.

Cheers.

oh nice - a list of hacker bait I'm seriously considering banning package code from our server - its too much trouble if its not kept updated - hackers just love it.... I had a customers zencart getting hacked yesterday...

Sometime it's not necessarily the code but the server security. Anyone can install a LAMP server packaged. If you throw a server together and don't know how to admin it or patch it, you aren't doing anyone any favors. But we're all pros because we read a tutorial on the internet.

I have a friend who had his site hacked and the "host" kept blaming the scripts. I convinced him to move away from the host and the hacking stopped immediately and never occurred again. And he is using the same scripts. Amazing.

Thousands and thousands of sites use Zen Cart without problems.

And if you do install Zen Cart without following the necessary security precautions that the development team recommend, well, you deserve to get hacked.

yeah i agree - and customers who install it once and dont look at it again for 3 years sure dont help either - no matter how good the server tech is - and i'm getting very tired of being the poor tech who has to drop everything when the alarms go off, yell for the other techs to do the same, and clean up after them in a hurry, never mind running all the hack routines after to make sure the security is still in tact for all the other accounts, who are clever enough to write or pay for custom code (which has not been hacked once)

Dont forget you're talkin to paranoid pixie here bud - that server is locked down so tight.... the only way these buggers EVER get in is because some dummy forgot to update their package code for long enough for the hackers to work out the exploits in it

Ooops - sorry bout the rant - but grrr - pisses me off when i have to waste a day to hackers

Hmm sounds bad to me, what about forcing your clients to upgrade? No way to do that? I've not looked in the Cpanel that close yet, so dunno that answer. I know that there are other softwares that force upgrades though. Some state that if you don't upgrade by such and such a date, the current version will no longer function (you could make a complete back up on such and such a date for restoration abilities) and then not offer that version anymore? Guess I'll have to take a look at all that too one of these days lol.

I could be talking outta my .... too so just ignore me if that isn't in any way a possibility, just throwing out ideas

Updating Zen Cart is not always a painless process. If the template and override systems have not been followed properly, all will be lost.