Website development costs

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#946036 5-Dec-2013 13:02

timmmay: On one hand $9K is very cheap if you have a good professional doing the work. On the other hand find someone charging $60/hr, provide all the content, a few days work might do it. A custom design/skin based on your requirements could take hours or days, sometimes one little thing you've asked for may make things a lot more time consuming. Buying a skin/theme would be cheaper, though I find the cheaper skins/themes sometimes need some work to get them right. For example the theme on my website does page names in a strange way, so every time I update I have to manually update the theme. I also tweak the html generated to make it more standards compliant, which is lost when updates are done.

Running on Wordpress makes things easier.

Totally agree re Wordpress. It's not as simple as it could/should be and can be oddly 'techie' when you are trying to do what appear to be simple things, but overall it is much easier than many and has heaps of useful add-ons such as Yoast for SEO etc.

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#946127 5-Dec-2013 16:34

Whatever you do, dont get a responsive design site done. We did and the feedback from customers has been universally negative with the site not looking the same as on their computer when they look on a phone.

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#946131 5-Dec-2013 16:50

richms: Whatever you do, dont get a responsive design site done. We did and the feedback from customers has been universally negative with the site not looking the same as on their computer when they look on a phone.

Sounds like a bad design.

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#946145 5-Dec-2013 17:02

Not really bad design, just not what they want to see. We are holding off launching it till they can make request desktop view work on mobile phones since that has no effect on responsive design as that does it all with the styles.

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#946155 5-Dec-2013 18:05

Hmmm, interesting comment about responsive design. I thought that would be the most important component considering most people have iPads and tablets.

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#946178 5-Dec-2013 18:59

richms: Whatever you do, dont get a responsive design site done. We did and the feedback from customers has been universally negative with the site not looking the same as on their computer when they look on a phone.

LOL.

Do they not realise that the tablets and phones are not the same as desktops?

Make sure you get it responsive otherwise it will look crap on the smaller screens. And if you do make sure it has the same functionality as the main site.

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#946180 5-Dec-2013 19:05

+1 for getting responsive design.

This just means that the site is capable of detecting the features of the device and browser that it running on and adapt itself to fit.

Unfortunately, there are a few designers that don't understand that the design for each set of capabilities needs to be different with regards to layout, interaction and information design whilst still providing the same workflows.

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#946600 6-Dec-2013 14:17

http://mediaqueri.es/

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#946606 6-Dec-2013 14:30

richms: Not really bad design, just not what they want to see. We are holding off launching it till they can make request desktop view work on mobile phones since that has no effect on responsive design as that does it all with the styles.

I don't think you can do that with responsive design. They would need a separate mobile style sheet, which I imagine would require quite a bit of work. Responsive web design is great, but has to be done well. Some of the templates with inbuilt responsive design can be quite poor at handling the different screen sizes.

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#946612 6-Dec-2013 14:40

They say they can do it to tweek the stylesheet to allow for it which they will do at the same time as the rest of our design changes.

Basically responsive breaks the ability to zoom on phones, to put wide images in articles without them making it a total CMS with the ability to produce multiple sizes of images and other things which a basic HTML editor cannot handle (the images go off the right of the phone screen, and no zoom or pan means it cant come back on) and the lack of zoom and pan on detailed images makes is useless for images of jewellery where people want to have a close look, so we would have to have some horrid script based image viewer which when it was tested had huge compatibility issues with older browsers which is a large portion of our customer base on desktop PC's so would be even more stuff for the developers to code around.

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#946628 6-Dec-2013 15:12

richms: They say they can do it to tweek the stylesheet to allow for it which they will do at the same time as the rest of our design changes.

Basically responsive breaks the ability to zoom on phones, to put wide images in articles without them making it a total CMS with the ability to produce multiple sizes of images and other things which a basic HTML editor cannot handle (the images go off the right of the phone screen, and no zoom or pan means it cant come back on) and the lack of zoom and pan on detailed images makes is useless for images of jewellery where people want to have a close look, so we would have to have some horrid script based image viewer which when it was tested had huge compatibility issues with older browsers which is a large portion of our customer base on desktop PC's so would be even more stuff for the developers to code around.

I could see where it would be a problem with image enlarging, vs the desktop version. Not sure how they can don't both responsive and also having a desktop version override very easily, because when the formatting is based on the pixel width of the browser. So if you drag the width of a browser to make it thinner, on a true responsive website, its formatting automatically changes before your eyes.

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#949458 11-Dec-2013 15:50

heavenlywild: Yes, I would want a copywriter, and in terms of graphics, I have everything that's needed, including the logo.

It's really creating a website from scratch, and transferring the revised content from the old site to the new.

I've been quoted $9k. The website would be housed via a CMS where I can go in and make changes and load content. Is this a fair price?

Hell no!!!!!!!

We generally charge aobut 2-2.5k for a CMS based site with workup of design, logos, page layouts etc. That's fully designed and implemented with some training. If a client wants to go with a premade template we usually charge between 400-1000 depending on what is needed. We also do copy writing, proof reading etc (dont look at my posts - i dont do that stuff <grin> )

Have seen a lot of shocking figures for very little work thrown around but a straight forward 20 page site should not cost 9000. do they honestly think it is 2.2 weeks solid work at $100 per hour?

Shane

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#949463 11-Dec-2013 15:53

nunz:
heavenlywild: Yes, I would want a copywriter, and in terms of graphics, I have everything that's needed, including the logo.

It's really creating a website from scratch, and transferring the revised content from the old site to the new.

I've been quoted $9k. The website would be housed via a CMS where I can go in and make changes and load content. Is this a fair price?

Hell no!!!!!!!

We generally charge aobut 2-2.5k for a CMS based site with workup of design, logos, page layouts etc. That's fully designed and implemented with some training. If a client wants to go with a premade template we usually charge between 400-1000 depending on what is needed. We also do copy writing, proof reading etc (dont look at my posts - i dont do that stuff <grin> )

Have seen a lot of shocking figures for very little work thrown around but a straight forward 20 page site should not cost 9000. do they honestly think it is 2.2 weeks solid work at $100 per hour?

Shane

Would depend on how good the design is, and how much work has gone into it. SOme web design is just plain ugly and cheap looking, so good design and detailing take a lot of time. Tweaking a responsive website to get it perfomrning well at different screen sizes takes a lot of extra time and testing, vs designing for just a single screen size.

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#949465 11-Dec-2013 15:54

richms: Whatever you do, dont get a responsive design site done. We did and the feedback from customers has been universally negative with the site not looking the same as on their computer when they look on a phone.

Have you tried feeding them your standard site, not resizing on a phone and let them navigate around a screen that way?

Sites in reposnsive design aren't meant to look the same. They are meant to provide the same functionality in an appropriate format.

If you had a 1000 x 600 banner on your site that didn't resize I bet they would moan about trying to get that working and when the text is too small to read they will moan some more.

client feed back shouldnt be aobut looks - it should be on ease of use and functionality and responsiveness.

Take my virusbusters web site - I threw it up quickly the other week to try a new design out - its not complete but only took me a couple of hours. It is also a reposnsive design that change three times depending on screen size. functionality the same, look is different.

Yes it will get finished, no i dont care it is slightly wrong in areas as my clients call me direct and word fo mouth. the website is barely used at present.

shane

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#949468 11-Dec-2013 15:59

richms: They say they can do it to tweek the stylesheet to allow for it which they will do at the same time as the rest of our design changes.

Basically responsive breaks the ability to zoom on phones, to put wide images in articles without them making it a total CMS with the ability to produce multiple sizes of images and other things which a basic HTML editor cannot handle (the images go off the right of the phone screen, and no zoom or pan means it cant come back on) and the lack of zoom and pan on detailed images makes is useless for images of jewellery where people want to have a close look, so we would have to have some horrid script based image viewer which when it was tested had huge compatibility issues with older browsers which is a large portion of our customer base on desktop PC's so would be even more stuff for the developers to code around.

Responsive does not break the ability to zoom in on phones. Putting in a line of css or similar breaks that ability. Responsive , if you break it down, basically comes down to using percentages in your sizing rather than hard coded pixel widths etc. Now that is a very crass summary but it is a lot of it.

The media queries stuff, which is used to help support responsive web design can detect different screens, and can lock zoom functions but doesn't have to. You can still do zoom if you want to. Just turn off that media query.

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