Julia wrote:

> I would never charge a friend for dinner in my own home. Cooking a good
> meal is fun and isn't all that difficult once you know how, but it does
> take learning how to do. The same is true for webpages. Jim keeps
> telling me I should learn to do the webpage for myself. On the one hand,
> web design is a professional service one should expect to be paid for. On
> the other hand, like cooking, it is the sort of thing one could do as a
> favor for a friend once you have the know-how. I'm sure she's not
> overcharging me, but she did meet me briefly at a party, volunteer that
> she'd like to do the webpage for me out of the blue, then bring up the
> price after she'd eaten the home-cooked meal. I have mixed feelings about
> all of this.

Here's what I see as the crux of the matter: Is she a FRIEND? To my way of
thinking, if she thought of you as a friend, she would have offered to
create the web page as a favor to her new friend. It seems to me that the
two of you are working at cross-purposes: You're trying to strike up a
friendship with someone who is trying to drum up business for herself. To
put it bluntly, your goal was her friendship, while her goal was your money.
(Not an unusual situation at all; it happens in strip clubs all the time!)
You did the appropriate "friend" action: You invited her to dinner. She did
the appropriate "business" action: She informed you of her fees. So far,
neither of you have achieved your goal: You haven't gotten a friend OR a
website, and she hasn't gotten your money.

I break it down to these three options:
(1) abandon all pretense of friendship and hire her to design your website
(2) learn to design the website yourself
(3) find a web designer willing to work for friendship and/or food. :-)

Of those options, (3) is the most iffy but also the most potentially
rewarding. (2) has its appeal in that education is its own reward. (1) is a
"lose-win" situation, in which your fake-friend gets a free meal AND a
business client. You get only what you would have gotten by picking a web
designer out of the Yellow Pages, and you cooked a meal for a freeloader.

Bob