Hello,
I am trying to find out what the cost of the following website should be:
It will need three sections or sub sites. One for consumers, one for professionals/prospective members, and one for members. The site will be used as a resource for those needing counseling. Our organization is non profit.
The site will need an area for members to login and have access to our database of articles and court cases. This database will need to be ssl protected. We will need to be able to update this database with new articles.
The potential members section will need a few pages one of them being a credit card processing page for membership, a blog, and a calendar of events.
We will want to be able to update most of the content and have a very nicely designed website.
I am looking to find a price range for this site. I want to make sure the person I choose is charging an appropriate amount to do the website. I am also torn between hiring a programmer directly or going through a company. I know a little about drupal myself and could potentially go directly to a programmer. What should the cost difference be between a programmer and a web development/marketing company?
Any feedback is much appreciated! Thanks for your time!
Comments
The devil and the costs are
The devil and the costs are all in the detail and it is unfair to a potential developer or company to ask a general question, get answers and then after they work out the details and provide an estimate to point to a guess based on this post and say their estimate is too high.
Just looking for an aproximate price range...
I'm not looking for a quote off of my very basic outline. I have no clue if this type of site should cost me a couple thousand or 30,000 or 50,000. I am just looking for an approximate price range. I have worked on other sites and know that there are many variables and quality levels...
You can get many quotes and get different results
Getting an approximate price range will get you an approximation of the web site you will get.
For example, let's say a developer tells you he can do this for 10K and another one 30K. At the end you will not have the same web site. The 10K one might be better than the 30K one, or vice versa. One developer might follow your requirements to the point and not provide feedback on how to improve the original design while another developer might take time to think about future enhancements to the site while building it.
The secret is to work with someone (or company) you trust and have an idea of your budget beforehand.
With a detailed RFP document, it might be easier to estimate the overall cost. But remember, if you give the same document to various developers for an evaluation, you'll end up with different web site evaluations.
Yes, if each developer was to build it, the sites would not be the same; each developer having his own development skills and preferred modules or theming styles.
That being said, I can't give a price range with the description you give out.
/*_*/
http://www.xmacinfo.com
I will give you one bit of
I will give you one bit of advice, don't be paying anyone a penny for developing you a site in Drupal. For 10k a good developer could hard code their own version of ebay!
Thanks For The Advice
Thank you very much, this is all very helpful. I have been told not to "reinvent the wheel" and that open source CMS systems like drupal offer a foundation that is tested and proven to be working properly. Are you saying this isn't necessarily true? What programming language do you recommend?
thank you!
That is very true, but
That is very true, but working as a developer Drupal is horrible. I have to make changes and maintain sites in Drupal and hate it. It has so much baggage. As for being 'tested and proven' take a look to the right hand side of this page under contributor links:
469 Pending bugs
68 Critical issues
1510 patch queue (is this a Microsoft app?)
446 Patches to review
Does this sound like a tested product? I know every piece of software has bugs, but this is ridiculous!
The database is so heavy, I'm making changes to a customer site which as about 10 pages, the DB has 78 tables and is 20mb in size and growing.
Then there is the size of the HTML pages, the same site has 14 css files attached and 6 JS files, these header requests slows the webpage right down.
Not true
Drupal is a good CMS and many other developers can agree. There is no perfect open-source CMS out there and while you will see bugs and issues - that is because people are constantly improving the code and modules. Things to consider and one that definitely made me go with Drupal after using Wordpress or Silverstripe as a CMS. The biggest thing that brought me to Drupal is the community. Everyone here is very helpful, offer great advice and are quick to help. Comparing that to others - Drupal wins hands down.
While there is a slight learning curve using the CMS - it actually is easy to setup out of the box. Theme-ing has also proven to be very easy. I'm a developer and it's like anything - you have to invest a little time to learn something new.
Hope that helps
Agreed
In my company we work with different CMS ...Wordpress, Joomla, god we even tried Wix and tried to see what it was all about. This is our first attempt with drupal, and so far like you said, one has to invest a little time in order to learn and understand something... in turn, actually be able to use something to its full potential.
This doesn't only apply CMS but any tool, or any type of product for all that matter. Thankfully the guys here at drupal have been very helpful and quick to respond any questions, so it is much appreciated!
Thanks guys!
Regards,
so true!
so true!
Not True
I think even from a coding standpoint that you are wrong and are vastly underestimating the time and attention to detail that went into programming eBay. Secondly, programming aside eBay has invested vast sums of money into:
- Branding and design
- Usability analyses
- Marketing, messaging and content creation
- Planning
- Competitive research
- R&D
- etc.
Building a successful website requires a lot of planning and consideration; the higher you go in cost the higher you go in percentage paid for planning vs sleeves-rolled-up coding. If you only want the second item, you can get that for a lot less than $10000.
_
Before giving any credence whatsoever to anything 'vmcg' says, you might want to see their bias: http://drupal.org/node/828106. Also, I would be highly suspicious of anyone who feels the need to register a new account just to troll. If one doesn't have the courage of their convictions, then it's doubtful the convictions have any merit.
Look up Site Plan, SRS
As many have stated here you are not providing enough information for anyone to give an accurate estimate. Even an overall plan for a site as you describe would run 15+ pages and a detailed one could go above 100. If you don't clarify your needs, then you risk hiring a programmer who will make those decisions for you and you won't realize it until the site is delivered, you've paid and are wondering why it is not as you had imagined.
Google the Web Style Guide and read about their system for planning, then Google system requirements specification to see just how detailed you can actually get when describing your plan.
Also you may want to consider adding others to your team besides a programmer: a designer, marketing expert and copywriter could help. Good luck!
Thank you!
I do have a detailed RFP almost finished. As I said earlier, I am by no means looking for exact quotes at this point. I just wanted to know if this type of site is $3,000 or $30,000 or much more... Just a general indication of what a site of this scope costs is all I am looking for at this point. I found this toy to be the most helpful at this point: http://www.webpagefx.com/websitedesign.htm#calculator
A site with databases, a CMS, and a custom design should be about 16,000 on the low end and 32,000 on the high end. I will go by this for now... until I get the RFP finished and can get actual quotes.
thank you!
With the details you've given
With the details you've given in your initial post, I'd estimate between about USD$3000 and USD$6000. Part of that will depend on the design as well - a good site design alone can cost USD$2000 if you get a designer who is worth his salt. The other part will depend on the specifics of what you want - as someone else mentioned, the devil is in the details. If you want something with very little customization that can be almost all done with existing modules, and a simple, cheap design, then you are probably looking at the lower end of that scale. If you want something that will require a fair bit more customization with a nice design by a good designer, you are looking at the higher end of that range. If you go with a free pre-existing theme, you can probably drop a good chunk of cash from that scale.
I'd be a little skeptical of anyone offering to charge much less or more than the numbers offered. People without a lot of experience tend to charge less, but you generally get a project of less quality. Anyone offering more is probably just trying to get as much as they can. Though if they can back up that price with examples of what they have done, it may be worth it.
Anyways, some food for thought. Don't hold me to any of it - it was only a very small bit of vague information you gave in your original post, so it's really just a lot of hypothesizing.
Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.
Hello, Being a developer with
Hello,
Being a developer with 3 years of experience ,I suggest you to go to website development company rather than the developer.Because while giving the projects to the company then we will have following benefits:
1.Agreement policies are there.
2.We can claim to the concerned company if the project is not completed within the time frame.
3.Quality is maintained by the testing engineers
4.Security maintainence
So I prefer you to go with webdevelopment company for more benefits...
cost
If I were a client, I wouldn't go for the price as the main factor of choice.
However, if I feel I am on a tight budget I would go for small- and middle-sized companies, especially in Eastern Europe. THe quality is always top 1 priority.
As for the figures, as far I understand from similar articles like here It will range from $800 to 4,000. Closer to the second number, I guess. However, I'd ask for estimates at a particular company if I were you. They are free after all.