I am designing a killer site on Peak Oil. I have written my website. I have a vision of what it looks like. I have been studying HTML and CSS on http://www.w3schools.com/.

I know enough to start designing, but I am thinking of hiring someone to make a template for me. I could then put in the data, fool around with changing properties in the CSS, and get it too look like what I want.

I know, I should probably write the whole thing myself, but I realized with a new baby, going back for a Masters, and work, my time is limited.

Essentially it will have close to 20 pages, but they will all have about the same format with different color schemes.

My question....I have met someone on another forum whom I have a great deal of respect for. I like his work, his style, and his input (he helped me revise my page design for free. He pointed me to web tools on the net.

He develops web pages as part of his work. I asked him how much it would cost. I know he has worked on it, and he sent me back this email:

"I try to give friends considerable input into what they consider a fair price; what sort of range would you consider reasonable to pay me for creating a nice looking, and more importantly well organized, easily navigable, accessible, and extremely easy to update website? "

I don't know what the going price is. I don't know what is fair. I am like a single mom (my mom was raised us single and was a full time nurse with no mechanical skills) being asked to quote a fair price on work an auto-mechanic has done on her car.

I don't want to quote a price so low it offends him or turns him off. I don't want to quote a price that is so high that I pay too much. I just don't know. Any ideas how much a web developer makes on creating templates?

Thanks

Have a look at my favourite http://allwebco-templates.com/
They sell complete website-templates in a price range from $29 - $159
I do web-design for a living, and sometimes make life easy for myself.
I've bought a number of them and they are very easy to modify for your own needs.
Excellent help-files and annotations in each web-page. Very good customer-support.
You even could modify the whole website-package with Notepad, if you know HTML.
Highly recommended.