

If you’re not able to convince the client to pay for this initial functional planning stage, and can’t find a suitable expert in the technology, but want the work and have confidence in your ability and passion to learn what needs to be learnt, then the best advice is to do some initial research in your own time and just take your best guess! Estimating Takes Too Long You, and the client, get to find out how you work together, giving both the opportunity to part company before being locked into a lengthy project. You have completed foundation learning of a technology you previously didn’t know that you can sell to new clients, you generate revenue and the client has a comprehensive specification they can use in their tender process. You give the client confidence, have a much clearer understanding of the work required, re-estimate and are hired for the rest of the project.

This way you can research the unfamiliar technology and deliver a functional specification to the client. Try to negotiate with the client a mini-project where you are paid to conduct a research and functional planning stage before committing to the whole project.

The client operates in a specialized industry and the solution needs bespoke features that are not familiar to the supplier.At the time of estimating, there are grey areas or complete unknowns.The technologies required by the project have never been used before.There are several reasons, which are freely admitted amongst freelancers and web agencies, as to why web projects are so commonly underestimated - they include: How many times have you been completely confused at how that ‘small’ project turned into such a big one costing double and taking three times the length you estimated? Many of you will say estimating time for web projects accurately is an oxymoron, but by applying a few effective techniques it’s possible to dramatically increase the accuracy of most web project estimates.
