Any website developers out there?

Villain · 18-12-2012 04:18PM

www.eu2013.net

Seems apt

tricky D · 18-12-2012 04:35PM

Sully wrote: »

As someone who runs a web design & development company, sometimes you have to remember that you cant judge a book by its cover. Its a very nice design, well laid out, good use of web standards and so on. It looks to the inexperienced eye as a simple job paddy down the road could have done for €500 (the amount of businesses who buy into the cheap designers/developers, thus costing them more in the long run or ending up with something awful is crazy these days).

But looks can be deceiving. You could give that specification to many businesses and each will price it differently, design and implement it differently. It appears to me that its more than just a bog standard website that allows various additional bits and bobs to be added, blogs, videos and so on with ease while ensuring the fancy cover remains. This would raise the price significantly. Some may implement the likes of WordPress or Joomla, but they are built to do certain things in a certain way so often for the more complicated specifications they are out of the question.

State websites will always cost more because a heck of a lot more work will go into it and its generally done by very well established professional businesses with a huge amount of experience in making websites for governments, websites that are complex and websites that must look well. This costs time and money. The more complex, the higher the cost.

But €244k does seem excessive. I cant see any business bidding in such large amounts unless that company genuinely feels - based on the specification given - that its a considerable amount of development and design work outside of the norm. I would need to see the specification in full before being able to judge and I don't think its fair that a lot of people jump to conclusion and start shouting the odds and claiming it could be done for like €500 for unemployed Paddy who sits around at home all day after he lost his job as a builder.

There's a great post (can't find it right now) from a while back by The Corinthian about dealing with .gov and how costs rack up due the likes of: design by committees, multiple and inefficient decision-making processes, content gathering delays, people dropping out of projects, excessive training requirements, stupid budgets which must be completely spent (or we'll lose it next time) and a load more factors. Nevertheless 250k is way too much and reflects the 'add a zero' syndrome when dealing with .gov.

As for the big A high contrast look, whoever is responsible for accessibility should be fired.

18-12-2012 04:59PM

I've tried but find the development cost for cy2012.eu

Aswerty · 18-12-2012 05:24PM

It's is utterly ludicrious that people compare a 500 euro wordpress site with the governments online platform for running the EU presidency. Large custom websites cost big money, to put it in perspective the following site http://www.python.org/ has been tendering for a redesign with a budget of $70,000. When you take into account the democratic process of decision making within public bodies it is not suprising the cost of doing business with a government is well beyond what you'd see with any other organisation.

With that said the price tag of 250k seems extremely high but more in the region of 2-3 times a reasonable cost and at that it's really is just guestimation without seeing a specification/contract.

Any website developers out there?

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