Hello

As already said well done on creating your first site

OK home truth time..................................

Dont make the mistake many people do and start charging the earth for what is by far not a professional site, dont get me wrong I am not poking at your work but it is quite clear you are "new" to this kind of design work so that must be reflected in the price you charge, also worth noting that your client will also be friends with other businesses in the Blackpool area a word of mouth reccomend is priceless, in fact around 70% of my new work come from existing clients reccomending me to their friends, if you charge a small fortune that is not going to happen.

At the end of the day you are not a professional designer and at the moment are not achieving professional results so forget all about the several hundreds of pounds you are just going to end up with a disgruntled client who is also a friend and then when other design companies decide to do a cold call sales sting as they frequently do in places like Blcakpool they are also going to poke holes and point out problems which will not reflect well on you if you have charged a lot of money for the initial design.

Dont get me wrong you have done well for a first effort, it is functional, friendly and gets the message across well, you have not done any SEO work however, a site that is not indexed in a search engine with a decent ranking may as well not be there, you have said it s a work in progress so am sure you will turn your attention to this.

In all honesty if I was you, if they are good friends I would offer it as a freebie on the condition they pass on decent word of mout reccomendations for you, if they are not so good friends and you want to make some money if I was you I would look at charging say £100 and then I charge my clients £10 a month for hosting, sure they can get it a lot cheaper elsewhere but then they dont have me to deal with hosting problems and downtime In all honesty none of them have ever questioned my hosting fee without blowing my own trumpet they have no need to I am a one man band but they have access to me 24/7 and I offer fantastic support, most of them dont even know how to log into their cpanel and have no wish to know lol.

So far as updates again it depends on what the update is, I can only tell you what I do but bear in mind I am into my 4th year now and have experience of Dreamweaver and raw HTML (to a certain extent ) I use Xara now for smaller, simpler sites as in the long run it save a lot of time, I will deign my clients a 5 page site for £150 very cheaply, its the hook to get them then £10 per month for hosting, some people charge by the page for updates I charge £25 per hour spent updating anything and I am over generous with this time as well, the most imprtant thing is your client feels some kind of value.

Hope that helps, you have made the same mistake I did BTW get your own site finished quickly!!!! I did this my own site never took any priority and I had all these backlinks from index pages of clients sites to an absolute crappy site of my own lol, it is stll very much a work in progress but is now fully automated and functional, if you are running your own server you could do with a billing manager by far the best is WHMCSdotcom if you get the license through licensepal you get it for around $12 a month, setup correctly it fully automates your business well the hosting side anyhow.

You dont need a dedicated server to begin with but for sake of providing "quality" hosting I would at the very least look at purchasing your own VPS server, whatever you do stay away from reseller accounts.............................

All the best and again well done

Chris