How to Accurately Estimate a Web Design Project
September 5th, 2008 by John Reeve
Whether you flat-bid or bill hourly, the ability to accurately estimate projects is crucial for delivering within budget and avoiding client disappointments. While completing over 300 projects for more than 100 clients at Pelago, we’ve spent the last nine years honing our estimating skills into an art form. Follow these four steps to create accurate estimates when quoting your next project.
1. Break it down
The more you can break down a project into its basic components, the easier it will be for you to estimate. By estimating the hours needed on a granular level, you will have more precision in your estimate. There are a few ways you can break down the project, how you choose to do it is up to you.
We usually try to break a project down into modules, and then further down into the types of work required for each module. For example, an ecommerce site could be broken down into modules like Product Admin, Order Admin, Customer Accounts, Store Front, and so on. Each of those modules can be further articulated by work type; Engineering, Production, and Database.
If the project is a simpler one and you are designing and building pages using HTML & CSS, break it down by the number of pages you’ll be building. A good formula for HTML production is to estimate several hours for the first page, and then an hour or two to build each additional page.
Breaking down the requirements like this gives you smaller chunks of functionality that you can easily wrap your mind around and estimate accurately. When you’ve estimated each piece, add them all up for your total.
2. Add time for project management
Now that you have an idea of how many hours the project will require, it’s time to make your first adjustment. Add 10% to 20% more hours to accommodate for project management. These are hours that will be used to compensate you for the time you spend corresponding, meeting, and emailing with the client. It will also cover the time you spend managing any subcontractors or team members. Freelancers can get away with a smaller markup, while design teams should use a higher percentage.
3. Mark it up, again
In an ideal world, our estimate would be complete. But it’s not an ideal world. There will always be unforeseen events and circumstances that are going to increase the original estimate. So we might as well account for them in the beginning. Mark up your estimate by another 25% to 33% to account for the fluctuations that are certain to occur. If the project includes any type of web-based software, it is highly recommended that you do this.
4. Add a margin of error
Some times you will come in under budget, some times you will come in over. Including a margin of error in your estimate gives you some wiggle room if conditions change during the project, and gives the client a realistic range of what the final project will cost. We usually use a margin of +/- 15%. For example, if our final estimate was $10,000, our estimate will show a final total of $8,500 – $11,500.
And that’s it, really. Now you have a number that will accurately account for the time needed to complete a project. Your estimate may seem high with all these markups, but it is far better to come in with a high estimate and deliver under budget, than it is to bid low and hit up the client for more money, or worse, pay for the overages out of your own pocket.
Tags: estimate, project management, Small Business, time tracking, web design
How to Accurately Estimate a Web Design…
Whether you flat-bid or bill hourly, the ability to accurately estimate projects is crucial for delivering within budget and avoiding client disappointments. Follow these four steps to create accurate estimates when quoting your next project….
September 5th, 2008 at 1:35 pmPlease suggest us any other top most Freelancer sites, other than Guru & Elance
October 6th, 2008 at 10:57 amI would suggest FreelanceSwitch:
October 6th, 2008 at 11:02 amhttp://freelanceswitch.com/
I understand there will be margin or errors. But, For a $10K project do you quote $8,500 or $11,500 or both. I am confused. Do you think clients will understand that when you ask them to pay $1500 more at the end of the project due to a +15% error? Or Is it possible to identify the -15% error and refund it to the client? Please explain.
Also, we face issues when we mention PM hours and cost explicitly, so we include it within the modules. This way we avoid clients seeking for cutting the PM cost and give us a reduce rates. This is really difficult.
April 7th, 2010 at 8:59 pmOur estimates are rarely in the $10k range. If they are, we usually ask the client to sign a time & materials maintenance contract, which is the equivalent to them retaining us for $10k worth of hours. However, the answer to your question is that we would show the total as $10k and below that we show the minus 15% amount and the plus 15% amount.
The plus 15% is never the result of an error, nor is it refundable. The plus 15% is usually caused by subtle changes in scope, integrating third-party tools taking longer than expected, or sometimes the project just takes a little longer than we thought it would.
Also, the 15% doesn’t come as a surprise to the client at the end of their project. Because we thoroughly track our time we usually alert the client when a project is threating to go over budget.
The whole point of the plus or minus 15% is to cushion an estimate that is not going to be 100% right on. Estimates are exactly that, estimates, a best guess at how long something will take. We are simply stating that we have estimated the project within a 15% range of accuracy.
As for the PM hours, those are never easy to explain to the client. We usually add them in as a percentage of the entire project and explain to the client they are non negotiable. In the past when a client as tried to cut PM or QA costs from a project, the project always suffers and is delayed or runs over budget due to not being managed properly.
It’s not easy but you have to hold your ground with clients and explain to them which aspects of a contract are negotiable and which aren’t. And when it comes to the estimate, explain to them that it is only an estimate. Projects will most likely change during their development and both you and the client need to understand that and be prepared to handle it contractually.
April 8th, 2010 at 7:29 amJohn,
Real interesting post. I just stumbled on it a year later.
You mentioned T&M contracts. In what circumstances does your firm use fixed price contracts and when is it best to use T&M?
K
January 24th, 2011 at 8:01 pmKyle,
We work exclusively with T&M contracts. The reason being that flat bid contracts are too difficult to manage unless the scope is airtight (which it rarely is). For more reasons on this, take a look at our blog post:
7 Reasons You Should Charge by the Hour
January 25th, 2011 at 4:40 pmhttp://www.myintervals.com/blog/2008/03/04/7-reasons-you-should-charge-by-the-hour/
f project budgets. How to Estimate a Web Site Project Patty Ayers discusses a five-step process for estimating web projects. Simple process to estimate times and costs in a web project Antonio Lupetti describes his process for creating web project cost estimates.How to Accurately Estimate a Web Design ProjectJohn Reeve talks about catering for the usual missing elements in estimates; project management, contingency time and margin for error. Estimating Resource Time for Web Development Projects Bill Breen explains one way to approach estimating time for web projects, and how
June 12th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
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July 20th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
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