how much for a website

M

Midsummer

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hi - could anyone tell me how much this should cost (not too complicated answers please !):

1. Basic website with menu and several pages of information

with

2. Message boards (forums)

with

3. Online store

I believe no.1 costs about €400, is it possible to add on 2 & 3 separately ? (Have seen no. 2 free on web and no. 3 off the shelf for about 2k as well as free - not sure how they could all fit together).

Furthermore would something like this be easy to upgrade and add other features (i.e. ads) ?

I'm finding it hard to get a quote for this whole package.

Thanks
M
 
If you can do it yourself you can setup 2 & 3 for free... but getting someone to implement an off the shelf open source board (phpbb) and shop (oscommerce) shouldn't cost a whole lot (maybe €500 to install,configure correctly and put on your logo ..etc)
 
Re: how much for a website - Getting it into Google

Brendan said:
If you are creative at thinking of slogans, you can get a free website through this competition on boards.ie
Click to expand...

Something else that might be of interest to readers here, a lot of people in the Irish internet community were interested in how we could get mention of their business to appear in Google only 10 minutes after their site was set live so we put up an information page here on it:

Just click on the "How It Works" button under the Google image on the right hand side.

Regards Eoin Costello
 
If you dont care ho will make you the web,you can look abroad for the company. And you may well save somehting like 300 € or more.
 
Mercenary said:
If you dont care ho will make you the web,you can look abroad for the company. And you may well save somehting like 300 € or more.
Click to expand...

Are you talking about rentacoder or the like, or getting an off the shelf product from abroad?
 
No, i mean hire agency which will do what you want. In Ireland thei wanted 2400 for website i wanted i was able to get it for 1300 which is 1100 less. But i didnt choose that as i got almost as good website for 300.




P.S.
there are many agencys that provide premade templates which you can edit or companys can do one for you , and you change the content etc, all you need to do is buy host. It will take 1-2hrs for profesional looking web. With proper domain name. Only there wont be IE in the end only com,net etc..
So probably that wont be good.
 
Flax said:
If you write out a very specific specification for what you want, someone on scriptlance.com will do it for you cheaply, e.g. < $100.
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Spending less than the price of an office chair on possibly your company's most important marketing asset would seem a bit misguided to me.
 
LeoD said:
Spending less than the price of an office chair on possibly your company's most important marketing asset would seem a bit misguided to me.
Click to expand...

Just make sure you pick someone who has a bit of positive feedback.
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Yes, and it took me a few minutes to find a rating less than 10 stars. Hardly a good sign.
 
Like any project you'd test the waters with a demo or proof of concept period to start with. That would also test how well the line of communication work etc. Then break the project down into different stages/releases and after each stage/release review how its gone etc. The person doing it would likely want to do the same and want part payment after each stage as well.

Approached this the ratings are not that important. Though as in any line of work it can be helpful to get recommendations from other people you know. Least you know theres a minimum standard.

Looking at the minimal spec MidSummer is thinking of, I'd would say you might to walk before you can crawl. Start with a website that you can update, look at who will maintain it for you, update content, edit it, and what the budget, and how you will measure return of investment from that project. From there move on to the online shop and forum, which are likely to need specific resources to manage these continuously.
 
How about the old addage, you get what you pay for.

Getting a website for under EUR2,000 is a waste of time for most web design companies in Ireland.

People always say that they want a 'simple' site and it shouldn't cost the moon, but consider this;

1. An initial meeting with the client, getting a feel for what they want, where they want to develop their site. What, if anything will they use as a measure of the success of the site. Giving general advice and best practices for implementing the site. Things like, asking the crucial questions about their target market. How are they going to get a return on their investment. Have they considered how people are going to find the site. Have they a marketing budget...... .... (1/2 day).

2. The site providers will then (if they're any good) spend at least another 1/2 day drawing up 3 or more draft designs to present back to the client. (1/2 day)

3. The second meeting. The client review. At this stage, the provider should try to lock the client down on a particular design. If they were any good at the start, they should have gathered enough assets and ideas together to have a good final guess of what the client would like. (again 1/2 day)

4. Having chosen the final design, with the obvious tweaking necessary, the supplier should then be in a 'cut up' phase of the process, where the design is cut and diced for the web, with optimizations etc. Any text and media such as images should be inserted at this stage. Again 1/2 day at least.

5. Staging release. This should be the final review with the client to ensure that they have met expectations, and have fulfilled their brief. Normally, the client doesn't take ownership at this stage. The supplier must now get hosting, email services, domain registration, and deploy the site to the new domain. Again 1/2 day.

6. Contingency. Anything from chasing up the client for media to work with, to chasing the client for payment. 1/2 day.

Above would be the minimum time I would expect a competent design agency to charge for the most basic of sites. That's 3 full days of work. Considering the fact that minimum wage in Ireland is €8.65 an hour, that 24 x €8.65 = €207. + VAT. + travel costs + domain hosting + domain registration. I'd put the base cost for a 1 man agency, without their own equipment, without the overheads of an office, heat, telephones, advertising, marketing etc. at €300.

Obviously the person would also need to be paid minimum wage.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are people who will do a site for less than €1k, but don't expect frills, support, and definetly don't expect them to be there next year when you need to change a few things.

To be a viable business providing quality web design services, I'd expect a minimum charge of €2,000 for a website, of the most basic functionality and quality.

Maybe that's just me.

If this budget is too much for people, do it yourself. I don't mean that in a dismissive way, it's just that a design agency will not be interested.

Paul.
 
^- Paul, do you own or work for an Irish web development company by any chance?

LeoD said:
Spending less than the price of an office chair on possibly your company's most important marketing asset would seem a bit misguided to me.
Click to expand...

I think you've misunderstood what scriptlance.com is.

Instead of using extremely expensive Irish designers, scriptlance.com allows you to hire extremely inexpensive designers from countries like India, Belarus, Indonesia, etc.

The quality is just as good as any Irish designer - the difference is their wages are probably 10 times lower than Irish wages.

As someone who has used scriptlance.com for about 6 years, I assure you it is worth it.

And I say this as an Irish web developer myself! I'm just being honest about the reality of the situation - it doesn't make financial sense to use an Irish company. I'm sorry, but that's the truth.
 
Interesting post Paul and I think you've captured very well some of the elements that need to be undertaken in order to have an effective, functional website.

I'd also like to point out that when clients ask me to bolt a forum on to their site (e.g. phpBB), they invariably ask, can we change this to that, can we add this here &c and these are often technical changes to the database (as opposed to purely aesthetic changes) which take time.

Integrating forum and shopping cart software into a static brochure website (+ design + customisation) and ending up with a coherent result is time consuming and I simply can't understand who these people are who would do it for less than E1k. They devalue the web development industry but the other side of the coin is that if you pay E1k and get your fingers burnt, you'll likely spend a bit more money on a more reputable professional the next time.

To the OP, if you are on a budget, I'd recommend buying a template from somewhere like templatemonster.com, then go on to one of the aforementioned sites and get a developer to throw some HTML and PHP around the assets, add your bolt-ons and perform any customisation. I.e. hire a developer not a designer. If you're looking for a well-designed, well-built, functional, search engine optimised website with people available to make changes and support your business, hire a web development company.
 
is it possible that some irish companies do all meetings/specs etc then outsource the coding to scriptlance type contractors. Im looking to get a site done and researched odesk, scriptlance etc but id prefer to go irish feel id have more controll when it comes to changes/progress etc. But id like to be sure the work is done "down the road"...
 
I can only speak on how my web development company operates. Basically we have a sales and marketing guy who meets clients and specs the project, then we have about 10 freelance designers, programmers and database engineers who we have worked with over the years. There are only 3 permanent employees of the company, 1 sales, 1 designer and 1 developer; this is so the spec can be approved. The designer and developer then commission bits and pieces of the project out to the freelance guys and gals. 8 of the freelancers are in Ireland, 1 in the UK and 1 in France. The important thing is that because we are a company, as opposed to a virtually anonymous individual, we set the standards, i.e. design standards, coding standards, documentation standards &c so that if something needs to be changed down the road, our sole designer and sole developer can quickly resolve any problems. Btw, apologies if the above sounds like a sales pitch, just trying to give an overview of how I would guess a lot of web development companies in Ireland operate.
 
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