I was fortunate enough to get a client's contact info who wants to start a side business and wanted to hire a college student majoring in web design from one of my computer science professors last semester. I'm as close as it gets, majoring in computer science (nothing deeper at my university), but I'm pretty nervous about it. I've never actually had a client relationship before or know much about the business end of this. I know pricing discussion isn't allowed, so that's out the window on this one. What I need to know is how long of a time estimate to give the client, whether I should charge a flat project rate or hourly, etc. My Google-Fu has given me an array of answers, most of which are pretty non-specific.

I have talked with my client twice, but both conversations have been very brief. I have experience in non-professional web design and created a web application for student organizations last semester with a "group" (myself and another guy did all the work). I did all the front end HTML and CSS with a bit of Twitter Bootstrap. It was the largest project any of us had undertaken, and 60% of the work got done within 2 weeks, though it didn't come out looking as well as I'd hoped when viewing in other browsers, especially in IE.

Again, I'm needing some advice on how to handle the business side, as the creative side can be spoken for or fixed shortly. The client requested a student specifically, so I hope that comes into play in later discussions, but the last thing I want to do is make a habit of playing the lack-of-experience sympathy card.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!