Charging Clients for freelance work

[festus]

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I figured it applied as making money is usually the end goal of programming.

I've been asked to make a few websites in my free time for a friend's business. He wants to know how much I'll charge for the sites. I don't have any experience with calculating these figures as the clients I deal with at my job are all internal.

These sites will probably all be flash sites without any data access and should be pretty simple. Does anyone have any info or links to good articles about this sort of thing. I don't even know what the going rate is these days.

 

[troytime]

i usually use a combination of hours + going rate for my estimates.

i value my free time, so if a website is going to take me 6 hours of work - my math is
6hrs X $100/hour - my estimate would be 600 bucks

of course, clients don't like that explanation
so i take the estimate and break it down (300 for design, 200 for implementation and build, 100 for the first year of hosting or whatever is more likely to please them)