I have been asked by two local stores to design and maintain wesites. They both need to be updated weekly. I however do not know what a reasonable price to charge is, so if anyone can give me a baseline price to work off of that would be great.

Are these sites going to be just marketing and info, or will there also be on-line ordering? You need a more complete statement of the size of the job.

Have you done any benchmarking to see what othdr firms would charge for the same task?

This is for a local pet store. They want to display all of their dogs that they currently have. Also they want a form for customers to fill out to request a dog. They need a page to display breed information. They have a list of their retail items and eventually want to sell online. This is not a huge store so they want to use paypal for selling. I have used php for an easy way to add and display dogs. I created the background image and logo. Overall the site will consist of 20 - 25 pages overall.

I suggest you let yourself be paid for the hours you invest in the site, i.e. 1hour+$10. I have absolutly no idea how much you should charge them, because I live in Paraguay and $10 an hour is unheard of (especially in normal jobs). The minimum wages are arround $0.85. That just shows how differrent our countries are.

The rate you can charge will depend on your experience and skill level. If you really know what you're doing and have several years of experience (plus references), you can easily charge upwards of $100/hr or $150/hr for top notch technical work, but the client's expectation will be that you can handle most of their requests with both hands tied behind your back. To illustrate, if the only changes they have for a given week are (for example) a couple of simple text changes on 3 or 4 pages, then it should only take you, say, 15 or 20 minutes to make those changes total. OTOH, if you're a competent tech, but not expert, then it might take you an hour to make those same changes, but your $30/hour fee would probably be both comparable and reasonable. If you are still learning, then it might take you several hours to do the same work, but your hourly fee would be much less.

Of course, you could always accept payment in the form of a puppy of kitten. When I was a kid we went to the local animal shelter and adopted a mutt (mostly beagle, and maybe some German shepherd) for the grand fee of $10.

She was the Best. Dog. Ever.

I'm a strong believer in flexibility. Setup the site in such a way that the customer can modify/update most of it themselves (i.e. adding pets that are for sale, remove them when sold etc) and charge them for that flexibility.

The only time that you need to be involved is when they need new pages/functionality and to do some maintenance (clean out database if you use one, backups).

I used to maintain a website that needed weekly updates. Got sick and tired of it or could not find the time. So converted it to mysql/php for the dynamic content and allowed the 'customer' to maintain it.

if you are a noob, you could always checkout joomla website and then do google for web designers who do "joomla customization". This research might take a hour or two but its worth it.

Joomla is free cms.

But templates/customization may cost you some money. A decent joomla template should cost you about $20 + $100 for custom forms etc.

From that point forth its just maintaining website/Publishing articles / maintianing costs.

dunno if that helps.

duh - forgot to post link for joomla - http://joomla.org/