So it's my birthday today. One thing that I've learned about birthdays from having a child, is that it's a lot of fun to give gifts away on your birthday. I'm now a seasoned goodie bag shopper and can tell you some interesting places to go in Manhattan and Brooklyn to find unusual gifts for boys age 8-10. But since I can't give all of you rare swag from Tokyo Toy, I thought I'd offer up a template that freelancers might find useful.
I've posted a Cost Estimate and Scheduling Calculator spreadsheet to the Tools. The document provides a lightweight method for learning to estimate time to complete a web design project, and calculating cost for completion. The intended audience is individual freelancers or contractors. This may not be an ideal format for the calculation of project team estimates.
Screenshot of the template waiting for values to be entered.
The purpose of the document is to teach you to get acquainted with spreadsheets as tools for cost estimation, with the hopes that you will learn to use and modify it to suit your needs. Please note that this is only meant to be learning a tool and must be customized to be useful to you. This is NOT meant to be an out of the box solution.
I hope this is useful to someone out there. I know there are other tools to do this sort of thing, but it never hurts to see examples of how others' get things like this done.
And no, I don't freelance anymore. I just hated to see this go to waste.