A couple times a year, I do a free site for someone. Usually a kids group or whatever. There's no real rhyme or reason to it, I'll just run into a site that is...well...bad...and if I know they are non-profit or if they get a ton of traffic I'll email them and offer them a free site-redesign.
The other day I was going over the site for my favourite band, Seven Nations. It's an alright site, but when I noticed they dumped an OSCommerce into it through a frame, I made up my mind they needed a new site. I emailed them and offered a free site, no strings attached. I'm just a huge fan and knew I could do one up in about 15 hours and they'd be good to go. I listed off the components I would do and which Rocket Theme I thought would look best.
Each time I do this, I get an email back asking me if I am crazy, a shamster, or otherwise up to no good. Now if I offered to do this for $500, they'd probably fly me out to their office for a meeting tomorrow.
People are funny.
Rick: Man, I wished I had met you about 8 months earlier! ;D Having said that, I'm glad I learned about Joomla and RT and am able to mess with my own site. Just out of curiosity, do you have links to some of these sites that you did?
I've done some pro bono sites also. However I don't offer unless I know they are looking for someone to help them. Sometimes I see a bad site and it's done by the site owner or a friend of theirs and they are happy with the site so they would be offended if I said something to the effect that "your site sucks and I will do you and the world a favor by redesiging it".
Also, if someone contacts them from out of the blue offering a free website, for their own safety maybe they should be wary b/c for all they know the person could be using their site for distributing spyware, viruses or spam.