Advice on Webdesign Business - Pricing breakdown

i'm doing freelance PHP programming and SEO Consulting for a couple of years now. I'm at a point where i am approached by a large company (doing business in the single millions).

They want a re-design of their (currently catastrophic) Website. Since i want to continue my freelance activities with jobs like that, i want to deliver a perfect website.

The pricing problem :

How to break down project pricing, especially for big projects, so that you can logically explain a person, that usually does not know that much about web & programming like you do?

Is there anything that i should pay attention to.

All advices are welcome.

Thank you

In my experience the best way to do this is to break things down until you all you have left are individual tasks. You then make an estimate on each task, adding a buffer to account for unknowns and developer optimism. Add estimates for meetings and project management and any other things that will take time and you should have a full definition. You then can track actual hours spent on each task and if you use the same format for each website you work on your estimates will get more accurate from the previous data.

How you break it down is up to you but you would benefit from putting some thought into it and coming up with a standard. This will allow you to compare estimates and actual across projects.

Something like:

• Global
  
  • Create/Update CSS (x hours)
  • Create/Update Master Template display (Page wrapper) (x hours)
  • Create/Update global images. (x hours)
  • Create/Update Master Template logic (x hours)
• Page 1
  
  • Create/Update CSS (x hours)
  • Create/Update display (Page wrapper) (x hours)
  • Create/Update images. (x hours)
  • Create/Update data load logic (x hours)
  • Create/Update data save logic (x hours)
  • Create/Update page validation (x hours) etc...