I won't give any specific feedback on amounts -- that depends not only on how you value your time, but what the site specs are -- but my one hard-earned bit of friends-and-family freelance pricing wisdom is not to do the ongoing maintenance thing. They don't need to pay you to renew their domain every year -- set it up so they have the keys and it auto-renews. Make an agreement for a specific package (a certain number of pages, or setting up a customized look-and-feel with xyz required features in wordpress, or whatever), and then promise them good terms if they want to make a separate deal to redesign in the future.

Make an agreement for a specific package (a certain number of pages, or setting up a customized look-and-feel with xyz required features in wordpress, or whatever), and then promise them good terms if they want to make a separate deal to redesign in the future.

This is good advice.

Thanks guys!

... and (one last thing!) obviously, the kind of specific package I'm thinking of can certainly include an agreed testing/troubleshooting/signoff period, or certain documentation, or a meeting to train someone in the group (oh, Fone!) on maintaining the site, or whatever you want -- as long as it's part of the package. I'm the last to advocate "here's your site, now go away".

But you want to avoid the kind of situation (which I've been in too many times) where you end up making every little change, or a million design tweaks, forever after. That's not freelance, it's employee.

Thanks for the school advice, everyone! I've bookmarked them and will be following your suggestions when signing up for my first class next month. I'm really starting from the bottom here--the only HTML I know is what I use for posting here and other blogs/boards, and that's it for "web design knowledge"!

Amych is absolutely right. I give them 30 days to break it and then anything beyond that is more money and a new agreement. Otherwise it just gets screwy.

A wireless SD card for digital cameras. That's cool, just have the phone in the range of your access point and photos are downloaded automatically.

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Flickr pro users can now see their referral stats.

That card is sweet! Reminds me of the theoretical digital cartridges that would have allowed you to use a standard 35mm camera but record to digital media.

In the tricksy sense.

Flickr referral stats...hmmm.

Am I totally off-base with that amount, or does that sound reasonable?

Way too cheap. The ongoing maintenance can spiral into insane amounts of time. My maintenance agreements list specific services totaling not more than x number of hours, with an hourly rate above that. They'll think of things they want to add. They'll decide the copy needs changing. Someone using IE 3 will complain he can't see it. The site will mysteriously crash.

Anyone here familiar with the new generation of printers coming down the pipe?

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