New website Design & Development Costs

Sonnenblumen

Trojan wrote: »

Be careful of underestimating the time/cost of migrating your existing pages, it can take significant planning and implementation, depending on the type of data (content), the existing CMS (if any) and the page formatting.

Would one use a developer to migrate data? Is this cost effective use of a developer? Perhaps a junior developer?

If not, who and what might one expect to pay to migrate around 500 pages of current content (approx 60% currently in Wordpress and balance in Symphony) to new Drupal based site?

BarackPyjama

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Would one use a developer to migrate data? Is this cost effective use of a developer? Perhaps a junior developer?

If not, who and what might one expect to pay to migrate around 500 pages of current content (approx 60% currently in Wordpress and balance in Symphony) to new Drupal based site?

Someone with experience. You pay for experience.

Sonnenblumen

BarackPyjama wrote: »

Someone with experience. You pay for experience.

You can also overpay for poor performance. Would you care to indicate what charges (day rate for experience?) and how much time might one reasonably estimate would be required to migrate 500 pages?

Feathers

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Would one use a developer to migrate data? Is this cost effective use of a developer? Perhaps a junior developer?

If not, who and what might one expect to pay to migrate around 500 pages of current content (approx 60% currently in Wordpress and balance in Symphony) to new Drupal based site?

If I were an SME, I'd probably get in someone in transition year & throw them a few hundred to move the pages over.

But then, if they don't do it properly, you could be affecting the SEO benefits or accessibility requirements of your site — depending on the level of supervision you're going to put it. If either of those is an issue for you, might be worth a junior dev alright, as at least you can hold the development company to account if you've any issues.

Or, if you're your pages laid out properly & well templated at the moment, it might be cheaper & far faster to write a script to move the content into your DB. But then it depends on how much your changing your templates (if you currently have them/make good use of them).

Short answer — it depends (again). Can I ask, why not just put up a proper brief? The worst you're going to get is a couple of bad offers; best is someone might give you a quote on it. Know you said you're getting PMs, but if you're asking the question to begin with to generate discussion, presumably that discussion on what you're going to put out to tender can only be beneficial?

PCPhoto

I'm not a web programmer/designer ...nor do I have much technical knowledge when it comes to the world of websites...but...

OP.... from my experience of paying for websites to be created there are too many "wannabe's" out there, if you want a project done properly, research a well established design house and pay the fee (it will more than likely be excessive but unless you know and understand the world of web design you cannot weed out the good from the bad.)

I've plans for a website but cant afford to build it - I'm self employed and have the idea/concept in my head and on paper for 3-4years, I believe it is still an area which could explode, but could similarly flop ...when I was getting quotations a number of years ago I sat down with different design people and the cheapest quotation was €25K ...most expensive was €42K, needless to say I couldn't afford to use a years salary on creating a website and then try to save for a budget to promote/launch it and regular advertising of it.... I have not been lucky enough to find some young college genius - the feckers are making more money than me before they qualify.

The Corinthian

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Would one use a developer to migrate data? Is this cost effective use of a developer? Perhaps a junior developer?

If not, who and what might one expect to pay to migrate around 500 pages of current content (approx 60% currently in Wordpress and balance in Symphony) to new Drupal based site?

It doesn't really matter how many pages there are as what any developer will do is write a program/script that will pull the content from the old database and convert it into a SQL script that can be injected into the new one - so 50 or 500 is all the same.

Short answer is ideally someone who is already intimately familiar with the database format of both the old and the new database structures. If not at least one of them. The reason for this is that the bulk of the work otherwise is actually analysis of both, with the actual migration programming only being a small part of the process.

So a junior developer could do it if they're bright enough, but will take significantly longer than an experienced developer. And an experienced developer who's done migrations before will be the fastest of all. I'm sure you can do the math from this point on.

Feathers wrote: »

Can I ask, why not just put up a proper brief?

Because, at this stage, he's largely tyre-kicking and people are still responding to him with advice - which is fine by me.

ocallagh

You might find a freelancer who quotes a ridiculous figure of under 2k but two things are happening in this case.

1) Dev/Designer has no clue what they are doing and you end up wasting a lot of time and paying for it twice.

2) Dev/Designer has no clue how to charge for a website and ends up putting 100s of highly skilled hours in for a lot less than the minimum wage. In this case you get a great deal and best of luck finding this developer! I've been that developer in the past and I won't be making that mistake again.

8k - 10k ballpark is fair for a very well designed 70 page populated brochure site with a CMS and simple user registration/account features.

Sonnenblumen

The Corinthian wrote: »

Because, at this stage, he's largely tyre-kicking and people are still responding to him with advice - which is fine by me.

Which reminds me of the cliched car salesperson increasingly frustrated, desperate and demoralised, who accusingly blames the uninterested prospect for losing a sale yet fails to find any cause with poor pitching or inadequate selling.

If you've nothing constructive to add, then why bother us with lame moanings?

Sonnenblumen

ocallagh wrote: »

You might find a freelancer who quotes a ridiculous figure of under 2k but two things are happening in this case.

1) Dev/Designer has no clue what they are doing and you end up wasting a lot of time and paying for it twice.

2) Dev/Designer has no clue how to charge for a website and ends up putting 100s of highly skilled hours in for a lot less than the minimum wage. In this case you get a great deal and best of luck finding this developer! I've been that developer in the past and I won't be making that mistake again.

8k - 10k ballpark is fair for a very well designed 70 page populated brochure site with a CMS and simple user registration/account features.

Fair points but are you suggesting €60k-€80k is a fair ballpark for a 500 page site? Not looking for any student, sweat shop offer or moonlighter. This is not a nixer opp but finding a reliable resource with requisite range of technical and creative skills with a demonstrable portfolio of relevant work is a lot harder.

Giblet

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Fair points but are you suggesting €60k-€80k is a fair ballpark for a 500 page site? Not looking for any student, sweat shop offer or moonlighter. This is not a nixer opp but finding a reliable resource with requisite range of technical and creative skills with a demonstrable portfolio of relevant work is a lot harder.

Charging per page is a silly notion unless every page is uniquely styled. There would be x amount of templates to set up for the different layouts, and you pick which ones are applicable for each page. The content can be scripted easily from one database to another.

The Corinthian

ocallagh wrote: »

2) Dev/Designer has no clue how to charge for a website and ends up putting 100s of highly skilled hours in for a lot less than the minimum wage. In this case you get a great deal and best of luck finding this developer! I've been that developer in the past and I won't be making that mistake again.

That's a common enough error for freelancers, and even a few Webdev SME's, when they're still green. I was lucky in that I first found myself in such a project when I was an employee, so that while I may have been frustrated by it, at least I was still getting paid for all my time - it was my employer who took the hit.

It is however a very commonplace error, which I've seen others fall into many times, which underlines the importance of the requirements and design phase of any project.

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Which reminds me of the cliched car salesperson increasingly frustrated, desperate and demoralised, who accusingly blames the uninterested prospect for losing a sale yet fails to find any cause with poor pitching or inadequate selling.

If you've nothing constructive to add, then why bother us with lame moanings?

I wasn't moaning - as I said, I'm fine with it. And it was constructive, to someone else's question - this is not your thread, after all. Not to mention the advice on migration I gave in the same post, which certainly should be useful.

Seriously, you're not in a position to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Fair points but are you suggesting €60k-€80k is a fair ballpark for a 500 page site?

I don't think anyone would suggest that. You already have the content, which is already formatted in another CMS.

As I already posted, conversion of that content is done in such a way that it will make little difference if there are 50 or 500 pages of it (with caveats naturally), so as Giblet rightly pointed out you wouldn't be paying per page, when in reality you're really only using a limited number of page templates over and over again.

ocallagh

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Fair points but are you suggesting €60k-€80k is a fair ballpark for a 500 page site? Not looking for any student, sweat shop offer or moonlighter. This is not a nixer opp but finding a reliable resource with requisite range of technical and creative skills with a demonstrable portfolio of relevant work is a lot harder.

Sorry, I was wrong to quote the number of pages. It's templates that are important. In the site you linked to I can see at least a dozen very well designed templates are used. That's what you base your figure off.

Once you have your template as others have suggested populating the content can be outsourced and/or done with a script. A 70 page site or a 500 page site might come in at roughly the same price depending on how the client has their data arranged.

If you wanted 500 uniquely designed pages then 80k would be closer than 10k alright!

Sonnenblumen

This thread is not mine but was started by me with some hope and purpose of gaining some tips/useful insights into the financial scope, methodology of undertaking the development of a website similar to the referenced example. Of course a detailed brief would be available but I did not think it resonable or necessary to post or make available such information to unknowns on a public forum.

I prefer to determine my own shortlist and it then invite submissions. As we have no in-house expertise with a project of this scale, here was an opportunity to add to a learning curve, pick up some pointers etc and the importance of the client having good technical expertise/knowledge. In that regard the exchanges so far would indicate that we also need to retain an independent consultant to assist us with our dealings with the developers. For that reason alone, the thread has been very useful. This would reassure and protect our investment and ensure we are avoiding any honeypots or potential technical culdesacs etc for whatever reason not least our lack of technical knowledge.

So although some of the contirbutions have been very useful and these have been acknowledged, they are not only useful to me who originated this thread albeit for 'selfish' reasons, the replies/information may also be of use to others who find themselves in a situation similar to mine. In that situation, it serves no purpose to make references to 'tyre kickers' etc. The web is already full of dogs and it shouldn't be too difficult to determine when or if a poster is not being sincere.

Perhaps I'll come back when our programme of work has been completed and discuss a comparative review?

The Corinthian

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

So although some of the contirbutions have been very useful and these have been acknowledged, they are not only useful to me who originated this thread albeit for 'selfish' reasons, the replies/information may also be of use to others who find themselves in a situation similar to mine. In that situation, it serves no purpose to make references to 'tyre kickers' etc. The web is already full of dogs and it shouldn't be too difficult to determine when or if a poster is not being sincere.

It does serve a purpose to make references to 'tyre kickers' etc., but not to others who find themselves in a situation similar to yours - it serves those developers who may not be aware or experienced enough to identify such 'clients'. After all, this discussion is not simply for the benefit of you or potential stakeholders like yourself, but all who are involved, including less experienced developers.

Perhaps it was unfair to accuse you of tyre-kicking, but it's extremely commonplace; potential 'clients' who either on fora like this or directly seeking 'quotes' when in reality either they have no firm intention of going ahead with a project or are simply researching so they can better deal with an existing supplier. I've done it myself, I'm ashamed to admit.

So when someone comes looking for quotes and advice for free and they're still doing so several weeks (sometimes months) later, especially when some of the questions appear to have originated from another party, you eventually will come to the conclusion that you're wasting your time - if you're looking to land business, that it.

And looking at the respondents over the last few pages, of those who I would know to be 'serious' developers, almost all have simply stopped responding - probably because they thought what I said aloud.

Perhaps I'll come back when our programme of work has been completed and discuss a comparative review?

If you want a proper review, you probably should approach your short list directly rather than continue with this thread at this stage.

You know what kind of skills, services and pitfalls to look out for at this stage and have a pretty good idea of what is required. Draw up a brief and invite estimates - not fixed prices. If the company/freelancer in question is good enough, they will be able to give you a fixed price, or something akin to one, once you've done requirements and design and it should not be more than about 15% above the estimate.

Sonnenblumen

The Corinthian wrote: »

Perhaps it was unfair to accuse you of tyre-kicking, but it's extremely commonplace; potential 'clients' who either on fora like this or directly seeking 'quotes' when in reality either they have no firm intention of going ahead with a project or are simply researching so they can better deal with an existing supplier. I've done it myself, I'm ashamed to admit.

So when someone comes looking for quotes and advice for free and they're still doing so several weeks (sometimes months) later, especially when some of the questions appear to have originated from another party, you eventually will come to the conclusion that you're wasting your time - if you're looking to land business, that it.

And looking at the respondents over the last few pages, of those who I would know to be 'serious' developers, almost all have simply stopped responding - probably because they thought what I said aloud.

If you want a proper review, you probably should approach your short list directly rather than continue with this thread at this stage.

AFAIK Boards does not purport to be a business leads generation forum? Sure some business may accrue to certain individuals but surely that's hardly the basis for Boards popularity. Perhaps there are different rules within this particular forum?

Serious developers have free choice, and if the discussion is not to their liking why don't they simply not get involved? Nobody owes them a living and expecting to earn one here is simply wrong. As to their seriousness, I would question that, virtually all prefer to remain anonymous, and one wonders why? Afterall, if they have no doubt as to their own credibility and competencies, why would one not make more or greater use of the sigs rules for self promotion purposes? I think we know the answer!

To end on a positive note, I do appreciate that some of your contributions have been very helpful.

The Corinthian

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

AFAIK Boards does not purport to be a business leads generation forum? Sure some business may accrue to certain individuals but surely that's hardly the basis for Boards popularity. Perhaps there are different rules within this particular forum?

Com'on; different people use Boards to different ends. Personally I enjoy debate and argument and the opportunity to blow off steam, but others use Boards for business purposes (I have in the past, but it makes little sense for me to do so now) - you've done so for business purposes after all, so you can't be so naive that many of those who answered here were not probably angling for work (some of the responses were pretty obvious in this respect).

Serious developers have free choice, and if the discussion is not to their liking why don't they simply not get involved?

As you may have read in my last post, some who had been involved withdrew.

Nobody owes them a living and expecting to earn one here is simply wrong.

Just as no one owes you free consultancy or to simply advise you as you want.

As to their seriousness, I would question that, virtually all prefer to remain anonymous, and one wonders why? Afterall, if they have no doubt as to their own credibility and competencies, why would one not make more or greater use of the sigs rules for self promotion purposes? I think we know the answer!

Then by all means post your true identity and allow 'serious' developers to contact you directly, without all this anonymous nonsense. As I said, you've probably taken things as far as you can here, without producing an actual brief and engaging with suppliers on a more formal basis.

To end on a positive note, I do appreciate that some of your contributions have been very helpful.

I hope they have been, just as I hope that some of those you did not find helpful have been for others.

Sonnenblumen

Update: Dev co selected, and with full agreement on project scope, architecture and all deliverables, now underway. Cost: a smidge under € 10k (excl VAT).

CMS: Drupal.

Exciting times.;)

allaboutclicks

I've just read the first and last posts on this so I'm sorry if I've totally missed the point but are you saying that bordnamona site cost €10k?

I know it's lazy but this thread is 6 pages long...

Feathers

allaboutclicks wrote: »

I've just read the first and last posts on this so I'm sorry if I've totally missed the point but are you saying that bordnamona site cost €10k?

I know it's lazy but this thread is 6 pages long...

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Anyone willing to estimate what it might cost to do a site similar to: http://www.bordnamonahorticulture.ie/ ?

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Update: Dev co selected, and with full agreement on project scope, architecture and all deliverables, now underway. Cost: a smidge under € 10k (excl VAT).

CMS: Drupal.

Exciting times.;)

Surely even with these two posts you can see that the OP asked for a rough quote based on a site & then came back with the price he(?) secured.

allaboutclicks

So that would be a yes then.

Interesting.

TPM

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Update: Dev co selected, and with full agreement on project scope, architecture and all deliverables, now underway. Cost: a smidge under € 10k (excl VAT).

CMS: Drupal.

Exciting times.;)

Thanks for the update and getting back to us, its always mice to see how things in the threads work out

sheesh

Good luck with the site

Do I get a prize for guessing correctly?:D

Feathers

allaboutclicks wrote: »

So that would be a yes then.

Interesting.

Well actually it'd be a no — we don't know how much the Bord na Móna site cost them.

Sonnenblumen

sheesh wrote: »

Good luck with the site

Do I get a prize for guessing correctly?:D

As I type, I guess your prize is in the post:D Congratulations

Scotty #

Sonnenblumen wrote: »

Update: Dev co selected, and with full agreement on project scope, architecture and all deliverables, now underway. Cost: a smidge under € 10k (excl VAT).

CMS: Drupal.

Exciting times.;)

€10k+VAT for a Drupal brochure site with you supplying all the photos and text seems extraordinarily expensive to me.

Any chance you would post the URL when it's done?

The Corinthian

Scotty # wrote: »

€10k+VAT for a Drupal brochure site with you supplying all the photos and text seems extraordinarily expensive to me.

List out, from what came out of the thread, what the general requirements for this project are and then suggest how many hours the whole lot will take, without forgetting the other, non-development, stages of the project, if you are so certain that it's expensive.

You'll find those who did read the thread and did a few calculations, and had a clue, all pretty much came to the same ballpark figure and I'm glad to say that Sonnenblumen seems to have taken on board much of the advice given to him.

Scotty #

How did me saying it "seems" expensive become me being "so certain" it's expensive?

Ok I'll have a stab... tell me what I'm missing....

1. Install/Configure Drupal - .25 hours.
2. Design/develop custom template. - 8-24 hours.
3. Copy/format all text/photos (Supplied by client, in digital format of course - 70 pages?) - 16-24 hours.
4. Build menu structures - 6-8 hours.
5. Configure search/weather/gallery/etc modules - 8-16 hours.
6. Test/Finalise - 16-24 hours.

I would think somewhere between 55-72 hours but I'd imagine someone with a good workflow would be much quicker. So I'm guessing Giblet&Co are charging €150/hr or thereabouts? Or, are they taking longer? Or, are they doing work not listed above?

Sonnenblumen

Scotty # wrote: »

€10k+VAT for a Drupal brochure site with you supplying all the photos and text seems extraordinarily expensive to me.

Any chance you would post the URL when it's done?

Well in fairness it involves more than a brochure site and although € 10k +/- might seem expensive (most quotes were +/- € 4k of this range, some were <€5k and some > €20k!!). It was very easy to dismiss the proposals (€5k and €20k) as these tended to be poorly articulated.

The selected company submitted a very detailed and well articulated proposal, and as someone who earns a living from design, I was more than interested in the detail of a 20+ day project costing on average €400/day.

Of course it is relatively easy to find a company to do it for less, but to be honest, most had failed to convince or inspire me with any confidence not matter how much or how little the proposed fee charge (several proposals were fluffy and introverted, weak on business case analysis, and lacked marketing credibility). The winning bidder won my confidence at an early stage, and if I get what is expected, I will have considered the fees well earned and wholly justifiable.

Let's wait and see what comes out in the wash, and I will be happy to post the url.

28064212

Back-end? Training?

The Corinthian

Scotty # wrote: »

Ok I'll have a stab... tell me what I'm missing....

The requirements.

While Sonnenblumen was speaking fairly generally and not in detail, if you actually read the thread you'll quickly realize that there is a bit more to what his project entails.

Consultancy Rule #1: Shut up and listen (or read in this case) before anything else.

@Sonnenblumen was any of the advice that was given to you here useful?