Website Project Estimation

A guided, step-by-step process for creating professional website project estimations using relative estimation methodology.

Core Methodology: Relative Estimation

Instead of guessing hours directly, find the smallest meaningful task and use it as a yardstick. Everything else is estimated as a multiple: "this feels like 3× the reference task." This removes the psychological pressure of committing to absolute numbers and produces more consistent results across estimators.

How it works:

1. Identify the simplest task in the project (e.g., a basic text component, a static page template)
2. Assign it a reference value in days (typically 0.5d per discipline)
3. Estimate everything else as a multiple of that reference
4. The reference value converts relative units to actual days

Why this works better than direct hour estimation: People are bad at guessing absolute durations but surprisingly good at comparing relative complexity. "Is this twice as hard as that?" is a much easier question than "How many hours will this take?"

The Guided Process

This estimation workflow has 7 phases. Work through them in order, but adapt to whatever information is already available. Each phase ends with a checkpoint where you confirm findings with the user before moving on.