usual cost of a custom web design

[primorudy]

what do yall think is the cost of a usual custom web design these days - this company looks a bit expensive:

http://www.imageworksstudio.com/custom-web-design

I hardly believe a website can cost that much these days - am I missing something?

 

[audiopro]

I would agree that they are expensive but I have found that some people are more impressed by a fancy sales pitch involving a slick presentation rather than someone who can get the job done well.

On the other hand, there are many tools available which make authoring a web site appear to be so easy, that anyone can do it.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[mmerlinn]

I was not impressed by their presentation at all. Depending on the type of website required, that MAY be an OK price. It just depends on whether you get the proper bang for your buck that you need.

That said, it is a good thing I am too poor to hire anyone to build and maintain my website. For the price they charge, I seriously doubt that they could even begin to tackle my requirements for a website, especially since there are no tools available, to my knowledge, other than those I designed and wrote myself that would do the job.

mmerlinn

http://mmerlinn.com

Poor people do not hire employees. If you soak the rich, who are you going to work for?

"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding. Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding." - Eric Raymond

 

[spamjim]

This is actually common pricing. There is a great expense in simply determining what a site should contain and do. That $2500 in discovery and planning could be below actual cost if the client has no idea what they are doing online. I've worked on projects where this stage lasted for months. $2500 would not cover the time.

I would be wary of the "per page cost" in a CMS. If the client is authoring their own pages, they should not have to pay per page. That cost might be reasonable if the designer is providing copy-writing.

 

[primorudy]

Hey,

Thanks for all of the advice - I agree, there is usually a lot of work done in the discovery, plus this company seems to be combining a lot of SEO/online marketing fused into their websites.

For the price they charge, I seriously doubt that they could even begin to tackle my requirements for a website, especially since there are no tools available, to my knowledge, other than those I designed and wrote myself that would do the job.

what kind of tools would you be talking about?

 

[mmerlinn]

what kind of tools would you be talking about

Tools to automatically build pages, no two of which are laid out the same (layout AND content are different, not just content), from a database without spending hours per page. Tools to conceive, generate, and maintain all links, even when they change. Tools to decide what goes on a page and when. Tools to decide when a page needs to be rebuilt. Generally tools that take all of the drudgery and high cost out of building and maintaining a website.

I have seen others who are using rudimentary tools that would do bits and pieces of my job, but based on the output, they all appear to be custom built tools, therefore either not available and/or will not run in a different environment.

Unless you are building pages with very complicated and constantly changing layout (not just content), there are plenty of website builder tools out there to do your job. If they won't or can't do it the way you need or want, then you will need to design and build your own tools to get the job done.

Since the contents of my site are database driven, all of my tools are written in FoxPro. I find it much easier and more efficient to spend 2 hours inputting and updating a database, then 10 minutes later generating and uploading a hundred or so new and/or totally reformatted pages to the web, than to spend hours on a handful of pages. And I NEVER need to debug the pages for bad links, bad formatting, or whatever.

The unfortunate aspect is that updating custom tools to keep up with web technology is a pain. In my case, I have just accepted the fact that as long as the site does what I want it to do, there is no reason fix what is not broken, even though it may look dated, may look amateurish, and may not conform to standards generally accepted today.



mmerlinn

http://mmerlinn.com

Poor people do not hire employees. If you soak the rich, who are you going to work for?

"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding. Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding." - Eric Raymond

 

[MakeItSo]

Ummm...

I was not impressed by their presentation at all.
...
For the price they charge, I seriously doubt that they could even begin to tackle my requirements for a website...

Mmkay.

Follows link [URL unfurl="true"]http://mmerlinn.com[/url]
*blinded*

You should add a frontpage warning to use that site only with shades on!

As to the rest: yeah. You need knowledge in PHP or ASP (.Net or .not) or something for an purely data-driven (cataloguish) site like yours.

“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.” (Kofi Annan)
Oppose SOPA, PIPA, ACTA; measures to curb freedom of information under whatever name whatsoever.

 

[audiopro]

I doubt if any, off the shelf, CMS system would cope with a latge database driven website. As for designing tools for creating pages, I don't see the point. The data is read from a database and is then formatted to populate relevant pages automatically. If pages have to be created in order to keep the process slick and fast, I would suggest the created pages / selected datasets are too large.

The company mentioned in the original post are pitching to their chosen market place and if they are getting the work, then they have got their pricing structure correct.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[ChrisHunt]

I doubt if any, off the shelf, CMS system would cope with a large database driven website

Erm... that's precisely what CMSs are designed to do, though it takes some initial setting up before you're up and running.

I suspect that if you were starting to build your website today, you'd be looking at a CMS-based solution rather than the spitting static pages out of FoxPro approach.

Whether it's worth the effort of moving to that set-up when you're happy with what you have is another question. I've still got a couple of static page sites from back in the day which'll probably stay that way, but I don't think I'll ever build another one like that.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[spamjim]

I doubt if any, off the shelf, CMS system would cope with a large database driven website

Erm... that's precisely what CMSs are designed to do, though it takes some initial setting up before you're up and running.

I was confused by the comment as well. I would even go as far to say that there is very little initial setting up. One does not even need to learn a web scripting language. A free GPL CMS like Drupal (certainly off the shelf) allows you to create custom content types with whatever data fields are necessary. Content tagging and in-browser query tools (aka "Views") allow you to display data in any way you like.

 

[primorudy]

so, overall you are a fan of drupal?

 

[audiopro]

Erm... that's precisely what CMSs are designed to do, though it takes some initial setting up before you're up and running.

CMS's were designed to allow content of a website to be easily changed by the client rather than needing the site designer to make the changes. It takes a lot more than some initial setting up before the site is anywhere near useable.
The main problem is that the designer of the CMS has had to allow for any configuration a site designer may require so has ended up with a system so complicated, it takes a long time to learn the CMS system itself.



Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[spamjim]

primorudy, I don't like to call myself a fan of anything but Drupal is serving me well.

I've used my own CMS, Mambo/Joomla, and WordPress but settled on Drupal for the past several years.

A visit to drupalgardens.com will illustrate how much can be done without a developer or a designer. The point of entry is much simpler than Keith makes it out to be ...but Drupal has the headroom to get as complicated as you want it.

 

[audiopro]

I know some people who use CMS for their websites and are more than happy with the result. The point of entry, to a CMS, is very simple but a fully integrated, database driven website is a world away from that point. By the time you have worked out which of the 1000's of modules to integrate with your core application and set up all the parameters required, chances are you will have lost the will to live.



Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[spamjim]

On the surface, that comment seems to imply that a CMS is not a database driven website. And that does not make any sense.

 

[audiopro]

It doesn't imply anything of the sort but if a CMS is as simple to use as you say, why are you rolling your own?

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[spamjim]

Using a GPL CMS like Drupal is not "rolling my own".

I suspect we are having two different conversations.

 

[audiopro]

I suspect we are indeed having 2 different conversations.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[spamjim]

I just slapped this database driven web site together to demonstrate the ease of creation within a web browser.

While it only has 4 records, one could easily import a CSV table of many thousands (millions) of rows.

http://cmsmatrix.drupalgardens.com/

 

[primorudy]

we all know its easy, but is it useful, and will it pan out to make you more money in the long run if you code everything from scratch?