Designer died - customer wants me to take over

[MrGamm]

taking over someone else's design that does not follow my own practices will ultimately be more complicated than starting a project from scratch.

It usually is when the design aspect was outside of your control...

Needless to say, we have no contract!

It's a new era of scabs...

What can take one person XX hours another can do in fewer but there will be genuine sacrifices made along the way...

CMS's can shave hours of a project... but someone slicing and reusing the stylesheets loses no advantage...

There are some people who demand "Agency Quality Design" and then some are happy "Whatever is Cheap" after they decide they can live with a loose and sloppy overall look... but try and find someone who can bid low on a "tight design" while offering a CMS underlying framework... no chance... jmo...

Having little experience with CMSs, i.e I have a couple of basic DNN sites for clients but I'm not sure that's the way to go, what do you recommend?

It really depends if your interested in doing one off disposable projects for clients which many people are doing... They grab a joomla, or a drupal, expression engine, cms made simple, wordpress, ect... My hunch is that the majority of these installs will break beyond repair within a year, get hacked, or pose such an incredible amount of maintenance for development that long term it's just not worth it. I don't think clients really understand the difference or have had any experience dealing with CMS installs which are prone to fall out of date with security standards and whose development is not directly in thier hands...

Take a look at wordpress as a prime example... in the few years it's been out... it's broken compatibility with hundreds, if not millions of websites because the template layer is embedded in the logic layer... the other option is to not upgrade and pray that no one takes your site out or injects it with spam and porn links...

A quick install gets the client up and running with a free generic template and a copy paste logo from someone else's website, however that's basically where it ends... and the costs shoot through the roof thereafter...

I think alot of people are moving towards providing SaaS services... Cloud Hosting, Mashups, ect are new marketing terms being introduced into the mix... charging the client from the point of view that the websites content, design, and development is managed, included in hosting... the development costs reduced...

These are just my opinions... I am sure others have different methods...

[weegillis]

Well this is a moot post now - I presented my proposal, the client balked. My proposal was over $3,000 (211 pages of content, by the way), and his reply was that he had been expecting to pay $300 - $400 since he had just paid the other designer $500 and "Most of the work has already been done!"

Needless to say, we have no contract!

Saved by the bell. Move on.

Even the most amateur of us who have reached the production level are producing sites worth $3000 or more. Their marketing message can not be had on the cheap, and they know it. Better not to pursue it. Let them come back with a cheque.