I have an opportunity to be a web consultant but not sure if I should [View all]

I have set up my own websites, did the HTML and CSS myself, but have not actively maintained or updated them since I have no new content to post.

My husband met the owner of a local store and they desperately need a better, more active website. Right now their site is bland, badly laid out and the only active pages are a list of news letter links and a contact link that automatically opens an email program.

The owner wants a way to sell her goods on the internet and needs a more actively maintained web site. Selling the goods is not too hard - I have already located a place where they list items of that type and provide links to the items from major web vendors such as Amazon and other large sellers. For a small business, I think this is a better way than trying to hawk the goods at an individual site that will not have the huge exposure. Listing the items is also easy - the site allows uploading Excel spreadsheets and the owner already keeps her inventory with Excel.

I'm tempted to charge her a one time fee to set up her business at the site, upload her inventory, work with her employees on how to maintain the listings and walk off.

As far as maintaining the web site, I think it would be a PITA to keep after them to provide content. Looking at what they are doing now, issuing a printed and PDF newsletter at irregular intervals, I expect trying to generate content will be worse than pulling teeth. Frankly, I think they would do better to use their newletter to create the front page for the business and provide a link to the storefront that could be set up with the seller I mentioned above.

My main questions are - how much should I charge them as a consultant fee for finding the online seller site and how much for my time to set up their storefront and to train them to maintain it? And do you agree that maintaining the regular website would be more trouble than it's worth, no matter what fee they would be willing to pay? Especially since this is NOT something I want to do on a regular basis!