How much for a website?

Lagz

Lagz

Lagz

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Joined
25 Jul 2003
Posts
1,980
I'm looking to get a website professionally designed. The website is for a software product and would need to have *roughly* the following pages:

> News
> Screenshots
> Downloads
> Faq
> Forum (ideally themed to fit rest of website)
> About
> Buy/Purchase page (could possible use paypal?)

The news and FAQ pages should be updateable via an admin backend. The other pages would be changed less frequently, so they could be done manually (however this should be easy to do).

I want the website to look really slick. I'm thinking of putting my project on one of those "hire-a-coder" sites. How much should I be looking at offering?
 
Just remember you're paying a human to do something for you and their time is valuable, if they're in the UK anyway.

Presuming he only wants to earn average wage, that's £520 for a weeks work... presuming he takes 3 weeks off each year, that's £640 per week. Maybe if he wants to make more - e.g. £35,000 a year rather than the average £25,000, that's £900 per week.

If you want to go and get someone doing 10 days (2 weeks) work for you, you need to be prepared to pay their wages.

*furnace is fed up with being under-valued and expected to work for cheap*
 
Sounds like a very basic website. Would be much, much cheaper for you to do it yourself.

I would only ever consider hiring a professional once you had an established business - ie making plenty of money and can afford to pay a nice man lots of money.
 
this will vary - if you want to be able to modify the content yourself then I'd probably quote you 12 working days, based on an 8 hour working day at £35p/h, you'd be looking at about £3500 plus designs/meetings/updates charged at the same hourly rate. 25% down with 75% payable upon completion.

If you want just static pages, then I'd quote 7 working days at the same rate (it's the forum that's putting the time up - I hate skinning those things, and it's never easy, so you're looking at about £2k plus design/meetings/updates with the same terms.

(this isn't me angling for work, in case moderators wonder - just quoting what I'd quote :))
 
Hmm maybe I should do it myself. Problem is I dont know any proper html and I literally have no time to learn. I've knocked up a few websites using *cough* tables */cough* in *cough* frontpage */cough* before. They look good, but obviously its not a professional job and will probably make all the standards compliant people on here have a fit :).

Maybe I should look for someone with skill but without an established portfolio, and maybe try and make a deal dependent on the profits I make as a result of the program and website.
 
XHTML is really easy - you should be able to learn that in a few hours. CSS is a bit trickier, but there are lots of free to use templates out there so most of the work is done for you.

Learning PHP to do the backend stuff is the hard part, but since your site will be small to begin with it isn't a pressing need, from what I can see anyway. So while you are setting up and moving forward, you can find time to learn a little PHP or, again, see if you can find some free to use scripts/examples.

Incidentally, I don't have a portfolio :p:eek:
 
Sic said:
It's the forum that's putting the time up - I hate skinning those things,
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Really? I LOVE doing that! lol
Sure, it takes what seems like an eternity to get everything displaying just how you want (I'm somewhat finicky) but I love marvelling at the end result. :D
 
You might want to consider buying a standard template or using a free one? You could use wordpress template with a forum plugin.

Lagz said:
Maybe I should look for someone with skill but without an established portfolio, and maybe try and make a deal dependent on the profits I make as a result of the program and website.
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I personally beleive that cutting a royalty deal usually implies that the client doesn't have belief in their product. I have learnt this from expereince when I was looking for portfolio building work, I basically got in a situation where I did some work but had no control over how much i would get paid. It doesnt matter how wonderful your site is, it's totally up to how motivated and hard working you client is at marketing, networking and selling his product.

SiriusB said:
Sounds like a very basic website. Would be much, much cheaper for you to do it yourself.
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A website that includes a CMS, forum, and a purchase page is "very basic"?
 
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Joobs said:
A website that includes a CMS, forum, and a purchase page is "very basic"?
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The OP said himself most pages will be mostly static, so a full CMS isn't needed. Basic Add/Edit/Delete pages and a DB would be easy to do and fit the bill.

There are lots of free forums out there. Usually a case of download, configure and off you go.

A purchase page using paypal would be easy too.

I admit that maybe not "very" basic. But it is not hugely complicated either.

Would be different if he was selling a whole range of products and updates his site frequently.
 
someone i know got his website setup for his gardening business, nice looking website, news, products and forum section, setup and running by a website company based in liverpool. £800 a year. i think it was a good deal

his business booming just after the website launched
 
wesley said:
someone i know got his website setup for his gardening business, nice looking website, news, products and forum section, setup and running by a website company based in liverpool. £800 a year. i think it was a good deal

his business booming just after the website launched
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But then he has to keep paying £800/year for no apparent reason :s
 
bandwidth, disk space get bigger all the time

to be fair, he knows NOTHING about internet. so the website company handle everything, admins the forum, shopping cart, emails etc etc
 
Beansprout said:
But then he has to keep paying £800/year for no apparent reason :s
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It's not bad, £70 a month to have his website designed/built/hosted/maybe a bit of maintenance. Much better than paying £3-6k (which going on the features would be about right for a mid-sized web company) upfront, then having to host it himself.

I work with companies who charge £600-700 a month for management packages which pretty much amount to a 30 minute meeting once a month, a few banners changing, maybe a custom landing page adding for a particular product being pushed. That's after the initial £5-10k charge for the site building.
 
Personally, I'd be wary of any company charging a really low amount for a project. A company that can produce a great looking, semantically correct and SEO friendly website is not likely to charge peanuts for their services considering the time spent on such things.
 
I think everyones seriously over estimating prices. There's a lot of progrramers who will work for a lot less to add to there portfolio or as they only do it part time. This is a very easy website to build. Most designers will already have the code and would be able to knock this out in a few hours. Most spent on graphical design not coding.

There's a good forum, for website programmers. But can't remember what it's called.
 
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