Customers love flat rates, but you WILL eat the time WHEN, not if, you go over. I offer flat rates for mostly HTML web design services. The client gets x number of pages and y number hours photography and we meet in the beginning and in the end. The client approves the site and I'm done. Any changes, unless I personally feel I made a stupid mistake, are billed according to my update policy.
For PHP pages, I don't offer flat rates. I can give an estimate of the time it will take, but no more than that. My absolute minimum hourly rate is $35/hour and I'm located in Southwestern Washington State, USA. When I do work, it's a premium service. I don't claim to be the world's best PHP coder, but all my pages are reasonably written, execute quickly, and are quite secure. My big thing is that I make everything work, and work smoothly. I have a knack for building features that make everything easy to use, as simple as possible, yet extremely powerful. I write online catalogs that the owners can update and upload pictures and everything. I create online scheduling systems that are simple and straightforward. All this is perfectly integrated and easy to use.
So as far as code issues go, well, most of the code isn't reusable without modification. I don't usually write a lot of comments, so that makes it doubly hard to see what's going on. The part that really makes me feel better about misuse of my code is that my clients like and trust me. They wouldn't switch to another person or company, and they lack the skills to work on PHP themselves. For simplicity's sake, I just leave source code on their sites.
The only exception is a new area I'm working on: writing code that is licensed. I'm developing a church/club/organization database with PHP & MySQL. I'll license it to people for their use only and include limitations on how many people can be in the database through PHP. This code I will compile so it can't easily be changed or modified for reuse. I also have a few other projects like this in the works.
I'm still learning about the best ways to do all this, but I think you might find what I've learned so far helpful.
Galen P. Zink
Computer Consulting & Web Design
(360) 609-2617
http://zinkconsulting.com-- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
