What should it cost? (Web development)| Off-Topic Discussion forum |

SVreX MegaDork
6/11/13 2:47 p.m.

Some of you are in the web development business. Some of you know enough that you could be.

I have a question about website development and costs.

My wife has a partnership with someone in a web business. He supplies the platform, she supplies the content, creative, vision, and direction.

The partnership is going sour. It's time to make a change.

The business has almost no income, but is poised to begin growing into something good (based on her efforts, not his). We are prepared to go the distance, the partner has just decided to jump ship, and wants us to pay him a big chunk of change for his (crappy) platform. We think not, but we don't want to loose the momentum she has developed.

Nothing about the site has been protected by copyright, corporate structure, etc., except for the domain name, which is owned by him. We are considering switching from a .com to a .org- the business model should survive the change.

It could likely survive for 30 days with no website, only a Facebook presence (my wife owns the Facebook page).

Please don't say we can do it ourselves on WordPress- we recognize our limitations. I want a good developer I can trust. Don't mind if he/she uses WordPress.

So, I am trying to see what it would take to hire someone to get this done ASAP. I am hoping to be up and running again within 30 days, and am trying to establish a budget to pay someone to do this.

The site would include a simple blog, about a 1/2 dozen pages initially, a calender (Google calender works- currently has 64 active events and 585 historical). It would need to support graphics, pictures, and video and have the capability to host advertising banners, widgets, etc. (some of this could develop over 90 days). It would also need to be very simple for my wife to maintain and continue- no crazy proprietary back end stuff.

What does the hive think this should cost for development? Hosting? Anyone interested?

We need to move quickly. Thanks for your help!

Giant Purple Snorklewacker MegaDork
6/11/13 3:05 p.m.

This can all be done on an open source, free platform from almost any hosting solution that uses a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) environment. So... no crazy proprietary stuff. There are plenty of options and what you are asking for is easy to build. You are shopping for two things - someone to stand it up/keep it up, and someone creative to make it look good. They can be the same person but they probably are not. It can be stood up in a couple of hours.

This is not in my normal line of work - but even so - I'd estimate 3hrs to go from nothing to having all the moving parts in place - then there is the artistic aspect... which can take infinity amounts of time unless you have your "theme" already done. That part is where I delegate to either buying a template or paying a person to provide one. I do not know what people pay for this these days.

The "mechanical" aspect, I have always done myself for myself and friends and I have squandered endless hours trying to be the artist too. I am not. I have done work for a friend's company using a large Joomla (CMS system in place of what you would use Wordpress for) at $60/hr. but that was for assisting to build automation around keeping it alive and healthy, not just general web setup. I think you should pay much less than that for basic stuff.

GameboyRMH GRM+ Memberand UltimaDork
6/11/13 3:10 p.m.

Hosting - basic package unless you want to host videos yourselves which is a whole different ball game. Better to host them on YouTube. To the site user there's no real difference.

Development - less than a Challenge budget for sure, sounds like a fairly basic project. You could probably find a student to do this for you for 3 digits (I'd just hope they get the security right, find a hacker-looking kid ). Wordpress would be a good platform to make maintenance easy for people of your...skill level considering what the site needs.