How to cost your web project

Andy Budd has authored a new Digital Web Magazine article: Contract Killers. The article is interesting as it looks at a few different options for estimating and controlling the cost of a project, including one relevante to some of us at the moment:

One way companies try to combat this is to write extremely detailed project specifications, which spell out every function and interaction possible. Once all the interactions are known, the logic goes, it’s much easier to cost a project. This is the classic IT project structure and is often known as the waterfall process. On the surface this makes a lot of sense, but look deeper and you’ll see that the problems are numerous.

The great thing is that Andy's solution, rather than being a methodology only suited to large-scale projects, is quite simple and very applicable to small projects that we might be working on!