How do I charge per hour in a legit way when building someone's website?

[desmintaylor]

I am now starting to get a slow but steady stream of clients now from my freelancing, and I'm kind of on the fence on how I should charge.

I was at first doing "packages" which had certain price sets for a specific number of pages.

Now I'm thinking of possibly switching to a hourly pay while I work on the project. My question is, how can I let my clients know that I am not trying to cheat them or anything by falsifying my hours. Example. I spent 2 hours designing the layout of their site, but a dishonest person will say "I spent 4 hours designing this for you."

See where I'm going with this?

How does this work when there is literally no time clock to punch in with?

Thanks in advance.

[tracknut]

I suspect that's very hard to do, for the reasons you suggest. When I did freelance work, I always did the initial site as a fixed cost bid against the specs, and follow-up work was hourly. Unless your client knows you well, it's hard to imagine them accepting a "I will just work until I'm done and charge you by the hour" kind of project, it's just too open-ended, even if they trust you're not cheating them. That's true in most fields, not just web sites. Imagine a plumber coming to fix your pipes telling you "I have no idea how long it will take, just pay me $75/hr until I say I'm done..."

Dave