Hello all and it's nice to join this community.
I've been doing a crash course on Drupal through Lynda.com. And it's amazing.
I have a potential project I'd like to use Drupal for. But I'm not sure.
This is what I need:
The site is a portal that list private lessons and camps for kids nation wide. Parents go to the site and sign up their children and then can pay the camps directly through the site.
The site owner gets a small fee from the sale. Sort of like Ebay or Etsy...
I'm thinking of using Amazons Flexible Payments because of the finders fee aspect. But that might be tricky to integrate into Drupal without a plug-in. I'm not a PHP developer.
The site is already up and running, but the owner thought it lacked quite a bit of pizazz, and rightly so. It's also been programmed in Asp.net or something...So it's a complete do over. He's also at a loss on how to get his finders fee. The only camps listed seem to be under the baseball category.
I'd love to know what you folks think and realistically, how long would something like that take me. I've only got one custom Wordpress site under my belt as far as CMS's go.
He was getting quotes from $40,000 to $100,000.
Thanks!
A~
Comments
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difficult to gauge how long something would take you as we know nothing about your skillset or how quickly you come up to speed, especially if this is your first interaction with drupal. There is a learning curve, and many consider it steep. This learning curve probably shouldn't be climbed while building a producton site for a client with a deadline.
40 - 100K is a pretty wide spread and based on what little we know of the project sounds high. Without reading and understanding the RFQ in total, it's difficult to guage as well.
Personally, and for your own benefit you should likely discuss an hourly wage.
Wow, VM, thank you for your
Wow,
VM, thank you for your fast reply!
I've spent the last 3 weeks immersing myself in Drupal. And am looking forward to finishing the Lynda.com courses so I can play around with my knowledge. I'm profiecient in CSS, XHTML, photoshop. I can get by in jQuery. MySQL and PHP are weakest, but I'm great at finding my answers.
The potential client has what I'd call a loose deadline. He had planned for the site to be finished and to his liking by now. He had one of his friends coding. But I think he's beginning to see it's not such a simple undertaking. And it's certainly not the kind of site that's going to run itself. He'll need some admin people etc.
I want to be very honest with him and give him as much info as possible, including any inadequacies on my end. I'm thinking of charging $10,000 or less. I'm hoping that this project shouldn't pose too much of a problem, since the site is already live with content and I just need to workout better solutions in Drupal or some other CMS.
And I would love to know if Drupal is a CMS that can handle this sort of thing. Because if he needs a custom CMS I'll have to bow out.
I'm also going to listen very closely to the responses I get here and if it looks like I'm in over my head, I'll tell him to catch me in a few months after I've played around with Drupal some more.
As VM said it seems doable in
As VM said it seems doable in Drupal but the devil is in the details. The estimate from what you said seems high, but again there's those pesky details.
You don't say how long the site has been long but it seems the bigger problem is why are people not using it? Just building a good idea does not bring people to a web site, one needs some sort of marketing plan. Also if doing the site over, it pays to study what works and what doesn't.
Thanks nevets, It's those
Thanks nevets,
It's those details that are my main worry and I'm pretty anal when it comes to design so I'll get caught up in them for sure. I think of the overall picture when I work on a project beyond simply designing and coding. I love to mitigate any future problems. That's why I'm going to meet with the client and go over the site with a fine toothed comb. I need to know exactly what this application should do. It looks straight forward but the taxonomy and organization of the data needs some serious forethought.
The site has only been live a little while, maybe a couple of months and the site owner thinks it looks so bad that he's not willing to do a press release or any form of advertising until it looks professional. Some baseball camps have already created accounts but I think he knows them personally. It needs some serious SEO work as well.
I honestly don't think anything is working for the site. The UI is pathetic.
I feel he needs to take it down. Replace it with a cool coming soon page reflecting his NEW branding and describing the product and have a sign-up form for beta testing.
You both have given me some food for thought. I'm so glad I decided to post here.
Thank you.
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tearing the site down will add to SEO issues as the site is already indexed. One would consider duplicating paths when you create the new site and leaving the old intact until the new is ready to go live.
I honestly agree with
I honestly agree with charging by the hour for this, I understand that you have a learning curve to overcome, but charging him 10,000 for the site can end up screwing over either yourself or the owner... maybe even both...
The reason for this is because a site like this you don't just make work and "set it and forget it" you need to study the best ways to achieve your goals and implement them. You are also going to more than likely use ubercart in one fashion or another and interface with a payment gateway...
All things considered, say it takes you a year to work on the site 8 hours a day 5 days a week... you just spent the last year of your life working for $5.20 an hour... and then after that you'll have to re-evaluate how you move from there, because maintenance and keeping up with bugs and security issues will also take your time and effort....
On the other hand you may be able to shoestring together a site for him that will work and you part ways, and then someone else comes around and charges him again...
I say, be honest, as you said you wished to do, and explain that you will only charge him for hours you are working and keep a separate log of hours you are researching so that he sees how you are using your time.
As I said though, this is not a site you can just walk away from if you are the only one designing it.. be careful how you proceed...
If he's offering 40,000 as a
If he's offering 40,000 as a budget why wouldn't you take the money and hire more experienced and knowledgeable Drupal people to hold your hand through the process? It would make the learning curve a lot less painful if you could have another invested in the project. You would jsut have to be careful as to how you managed the project and the clients expectations. I have recently started and project that I went with Drupal on and I found that the answers are there but sometimes they are there two weeks after the questions came up and "It is for sure that you will know how to build a better house AFTER you have built it".
I think he meant that the
I think he meant that the owner has gotten quotes for that, and obviously wanted a lesser price...
so go with 25 and do the same
so go with 25 and do the same thing