Project management for new website

Hi there!

I work for a company that just picked up a potential new client that would like me to redo their website from scratch. I only know HTML and CSS but I can backwards engineer PHP to an extent and I have experience with Java. Keeping this in mind...

...we need to draw up a contract for them in which we state how much we are charging and how long we expect it to take in actual hours worked. I was given one estimate by my roommate who does freelance work but my boss would prefer that I get at least two more quotes to get an idea of roughly how long we should quote them.

I'll be doing it on my own and will likely be using some sort of CMS. My roommate suggested that I use Wordpress since the client wants to be able to easily update their own content as information changes and news releases are written. According to her, I'll only need to hard code the index and an internal page but the formatting of the content in Wordpress is what will take the longest. The client's site, currently, is far too large so I'm going to have them narrow it down but I don't have any idea how much they'll cut out as of right now. Currently, they have approximately 80 pages...I think we can narrow that down significantly but we'll see.

Using your best guesstimate, keeping in mind that I am still rather new, what would you quote for time spent on this website?

If the site consists mostly of pages with static content then WordPress is a good choice for something like this.

I would allow at least a day to get WordPress set up the way you want (server configured, all your plugins installed, user accounts configured, categories created, etc.). Maybe two if you've never used WordPress before or are not that familiar with setting up PHP scripts.

I would allow 3-5 days for an experienced developer to build a custom WordPress theme, probably triple if you're not familiar with PHP.

For static pages I would allow 2-4 hours per page, depending on the complexity of the page. Also depending on how many browsers they want to support. If they want to support IE 7, add on another hour per page. If they want to support IE 6, add on another 2 hours per page. Supporting IE 8-9, Firefox (latest), Chrome (latest) and Safari is usually sufficient.

Without seeing the site I have no idea why you would need to hard code the index page and an internal page, but doing that would obviously take some time too.

If the site has anything dynamic, that would take extra time (things like e-commerce, anything that requires a user login, any forms that the user submits, any integration with third party APIs, etc.).

Overall the client is probably looking at $10k - $20k for a quality rebuild of the whole site by a professional developer.