I’m managing editor for a website that hasn’t been upgraded since it was first created about seven years ago. The design is ugly as hell, and the version of the software is, needless to say, several upgrades out of date.
The price quoted for an update and redesign is a tad under $10K, which strikes me as a lot of money. Without getting into the full ins and outs of this, the breakdown is
It’s really hard to say without seeing the site itself and knowing what the proposed changes are. For some of my clients, $10K wouldn’t even get the upgrade started. For others, $10K would be two or three times as much as what it would cost to throw away the old site and redo it completely. Without an idea of how large the site is, what kind of functionality it needs, what your expectations are as far as graphic design, and about a dozen other details, I don’t see how this question can be answered.
I agree that it’s impossible to say without any specifics. However, given no specifics I’d say it’s more likely that it’s low or a really fair deal than that it’s high.
Is the title managing editor a meaningful title or just something you call yourself? There are certainly some sites simple enough that $10,000 is overkill but I don’t think many that require a staff are.
Ultimately I completely agree with Athena that details are essential to give a more meaningful answer.
Yeah, I know it was kind of a dumb question, but I’m a little leery about putting a client’s (identifiable) bidness out here.
Additional info:
This is a non-profit, arts-oriented, fairly local site. We get about 25K unique visitors a month, so we’re not *totally *rinky-dink, but it’s a pretty small operation. We’re currently undergoing a re-evaluation of where the site is and where it’s going – whether this is just a hobby for the founder that’s going to die when he retires, or whether we want to make it an ongoing sustainable resource. To do this, we need to make some changes – like a redesign and upgrade of the site, which is a) clunky on the back end and b) ugly on the front end.
We’re enough of a “real site” to have a managing editor, me, which is a recent development. I am very part-time and give them about 8-10 hours/week.
$10K didn’t seem crazy to me, but the head guy is going to get quite a surprise when I walk him through the proposal, and I just wanted a little reassurance that this really is what it costs. Let’s just say that $10K is over 10% of our current operating budget, so a very substantial investment.
Again, thanks for everyone’s comments, and I do totally understand that without specifics, I can’t get a truly detailed answer.
With the additional info you’ve given, $10,000 seems a little steep. Again, without specifics I can only guess. But a small arts-oriented non-profit could probably get by (and be a huge improvement over the current site) with something a bit cheaper.
Our store paid about 10K to get a website started from (more or less) scratch. We had something, but we paid someone to basically scrap it and start over.
There would be a lot of migrating material over from the current website to the new one – we’ve got seven years’ worth of reviews and essays to keep available. (We’re somewhere between a blog and an e-zine in function.)
And the upgrade in CMS is substantial – we’re running on v. 1.6.4, and the most recent version is 2.5.3, so I think the developer is anticipating a snag or two along that way.
I upgraded a website for a nonprofit I volunteer for last year and paid $6000. This got us a completely new and much more versatile CMS (we went from wordpress to drupal) and the site was very comprehensive.
A couple thoughts:
-you can save a ton of money by migrating the content yourself vs having your developer do it.
-not sure if this will work in your case, but given your site’s traffic, you might consider adding advertising to the site. We we able to charge our sponsors $500 for a revolving ad in the side bar, that ended up paying for the upgrade and then some.
Yeah, we’re looking at doing better on creating income, both through advertising and fundraising. Basically we’ve got a bajillion plans, and I’m trying to sort them out and prioritize them.
A database-driven website is going to cost more than a static one. A website with lots of pages/content is going to cost more than a small one. And anything involving the purchase of new software (the CMS), is going to cost more too.
You might save labor time/cost if you do a complete clean install of the latest version of the CMS, but whether that saves you money overall will depend on the pricing structure of the software – the upgrade plus labor may be cheaper than buying the whole thing.
It sounds like this is a site with hundreds of pages by now, so between the migration, the upgrade, plus brand-new design AND consulting on branding/marketing, yeah, $10K is a steal.
Like others have said, there aren’t really enough specifics to answer your question.
a. Make sure it is a fixed price bid (instead of $125/hr and the project may run over on hours). Explicitly state what is constitutes the “completed project”. E.g. the existing content migrated over to a new site.
b. If you’re doing a major CMS upgrade, have you (or is your developer) looked at the differences between the major CMS out there? I started out Joomla and left it because Drupal was far more flexible, could grow with the sites and had better security features. IF you are paying for the CMS to be maintained, then you should choose what will work best for your long term goals. If you decide that you want to grow your organization, there are a lot of tools out there and many of them are free to use.
To get better answers, you might classify the functionality that you need (instead of your actual client): Examples:
Shopping cart for products, services, digital product access, or events
Event planning and/or sign up
Content Type Management (e.g. articles handled through an editorial work process w/approval for release)
Resources/Content Database (e.g. A list of XYZ providers that can be sorted by attributes [price, location] and/or displayed to a google map)
Role based access (e.g. Resource providers can sign up for their own account and manage the information in their own database record)
Forums (simple or advance styles? all public, or a combination of public, private and subscriber access)
Event Calendars
User community relationship management (e.g. who is related to or knows who on the site)
Those are just some ideas of functions (btw all from Drupal)…
If you look at total cost of ownership, then I disagree with this statement. A CMS is going to be a DB driven site and the benefit is that you define specific data types that are availabe to specific user roles (e.g. You can have ten reporters who can create articles that are then submitted to editorial review and for publication). Once the data type is defined, there is no cost to adding the information to the site. A static site will sink in SEO (and so loose value). A site that routinely adds articles and information has a greater chance of ROI for the organization.
This is true of a STATIC site. Not true for a well designed CMS site.
There are not licensing fees for the CMS that I’m aware of. There are a few add-ons that may have licensing fees, but I can accomplish a lot based soley on open source modules. So, the software itself doesn’t have to cost (and for the most part will not have a cost). But there are hosting fees and if you don’t have an in-house integrator, then there will be integration costs. But those are more likely to be one-time costs and not a cost/page.
Agreed. A clean CMS, designed to specs, then migrate the existing data into the new database. None of the existing data needs to be (or should be) lost.
This is the key thing. You have to figure what you want to do with a website before you can assess how much it will cost.
That said - I don’t know what sort of non-profit it is, but having a solid web presence would probably be just as important as all your other types of advertising combined. I can’t imagine letting it die out completely is in their best interest. Even a well-managed Facebook presence, if nothing else, can make a vital difference in your outfit’s fundraising and communication efforts. (And Facebook could add up too, if you needed to do sponsored posts. It’s not necessarily a “free” option.)
Sure, except that wasn’t the OP’s question. She wanted to know if a flat-fee for a website redesign at $10K was reasonable. Not whether maintenance costs would be more or less in the long run.
How do YOUR web developers usually price data migration costs? By volume of data to be migrated, no? That’s how mine did. We went so far (after the sticker shock) as to reduce costs by deciding to sacrifice some of our old data instead of migrating it.
Hence the reason I said the “purchase of software.” One does not purchase free software. There are proprietary CMSs out there, which do have an associated cost. Like Ektron. Using free software is a good way to reduce said costs. But I don’t know what platform this organization is currently using, if it’s free, and if it’s practical for them to consider switching to a different CMS in the event it is not.
Who other than you is talking about price per page? We’re talking about a flat project fee.
Well, in my experience, static sites require a programmer to add pages (or have really painful interfaces for others to add pages and that makes them go stale quickly). Re-reading your post, you assumed 100 pages, in my opinion, $10k for 100 pages is insanely expensive. But then again, neither of us know what the project actually includes.
Pricing is by the table/structure. Volume only becomes a pricing issue when you’re talking about TBs of data. I don’t imagine that the web site being discussed here is even reaching a GB. Since we deal with mapping one DB to another, we’ve never had to orphan data except for when the design called for it. (e.g. a common data element to exclude are stored Credit Card numbers that should never have been stored in the first place)
Isn’t this the best time for them to define what they hope to gain from their Internet presence (before funding this project)? Clearly their current CMS went unsupported for quite a while and if it doesn’t meet their needs going forward, then this would be a great time to change. There are plenty of open source options available and I doubt that an organization with a $100k/yr budget is either big enough to justify or funded for a commercial CMS like the one you provided.
Then please explain what you mean when you say static. I understand static to mean the pages are not changing and they’re typically built with gui interfaces (e.g. like Dreamweaver and that suite of programs).
You’re making the assumption that paying a licensing fee for a product will increase the overall project cost; that’s not necessarily true. A lot of the licensed CMS’s include really good product support and more robust/easier/faster-to-setup tools. Depending on just what a customer want, it may well be that a license costs less in the total picture than using an open source option that would involve more custom programming and/or longer development time.
If that wasn’t the case, non-free CMSs simply wouldn’t exist because there are about a gazillion free ones out there. There are advantages of paying for things, sometimes, and (once again) depending on the project.
No, I said that many CMS applications do not have a licensing fee, so there is the possibility for NO COST for software. Certainly a ‘free’ application that is horrible to deal with (e.g. I found Joomla to be this way) would cost more in time, frustration and lost opportunities than it would be worth. Now, a person who loves Joomla would feel entirely different and would probably feel like Drupal was too ‘expensive’ (in time/integration/etc) for what you get.
I don’t argue that the commercial CMS products provide better support and much closer to a turn-key system. But, the commercial CMS products that I’ve seen are starting in the $10k/yr (some even $35k/yr) price ranges. Those are starting prices for small orgs on hosted platforms (= annual $10k cost) w/out integration or customizations.
If you buy an application to host your own site, then you have ISP charges and you’re looking at maintenance fees that usually run 20% of license fee (so, @$2k/yr on a $10k application). And you still face integration/customizations.
Again, this is the time for the organization to look at these things and make decisions in light of where they want to be in 3-5 years from now. If their current platform isn’t going to do it, then maybe they can justify $12k/yr for a commercially hosted CMS.
Without any specs or requirements analysis… who knows what will be cost effective and what is or isn’t a good deal.