I was asked this question by the mother of a person who is probably the worlds best at a not particularly well followed sport. Even so, he is getting endorsement contracts and is going to start a website. She wanted to know what a ballpark price to develop and maintain a website. It would not be particularly elaborate but would need to be nice in appearance, and updated regularly. It would also contain a bulletin board. So what is the going price (approx.) for the care and feeding of a website like that described.
It would really help if you could post links to a few sites similar in size and function to the site the friend hopes to have.
Flash or no flash? Scripts or no scripts? etc. etc.
Ok, I will look around and see what I can find. When it comes to web design I know essentially nothing. Don’t even no what scripts are but will try to find something along the lines of what she has in mind.
The great thing about websites is that they can start small - four hours work by a moderately skilled person can result in a page that has information and a little prettiness; or be a full time job for dozens of people. As absurd as it sounds, it can be hard to spot the difference between them at first glance (or even with a little digging!).
I run a particularly content intensive website (okok, it’s porn!), and we employ three people full time, tho none of us actually spend THAT much time on maintaining the website itself. We have an expensive but very good content management system to release content (images and video) at specific times, so we can get on with content creation (ie, photographing models) - much more work intensive.
So here’re some figures. You need to break this down into setup and running costs. Most of this depends on the traffic you expect (ie, how many people a day will be looking at, and actively using the website), and, of course, what your budget is.
Discussion board software (I figure this is what you mean by “bulletin board”?) you’re using an excellent product now, vBulletin, is about $160US for a commercial license. Cheap considering how damn cool it is.
Hosting (the website has to reside on a server), depends on the amount of traffic you website gets, but $20 to $100 a month, depending on perks. If you don’t know much about web hosting, you’d probably be prepared to pay more ($80 to $100) and have the hosting company take care of the details. It’s a very competitive market out there currently, so shop around and do research into what you need.
Maintenance - you need someone to administer and moderate the discussion boards (what happens when people are jerks and fight?). It’s nice to have someone who participates on the boards as well, in a managerial position.
This someone would also post the news, make image galleries, and expand the site as it needs to be done. There are software packages out there that facilitate this, but I don’t use them, so I don’t know much about them. I think you’d be better off employing a fan with web skills, as a start off (assuming you want to start cheap - see below).
Depending on the geek and their skills (and age!), you can pay from $15 to around $60US per hour for their work. Once the site has been set up, there might not be much work that requires a lot of skill, so anyone with a good knowledge of computers could learn it pretty fast. Not recommended for a total newbie, though.
Design is tricky. You can pay anywhere from $100 for a standard template with your own info pasted in (pretty much any highschool kid could do this), up to a design company that will have a team of designers working on it for months - and anywhere in the middle. There is a definite threshold where no matter how much you pay, you don’t get a better looking website (but you might get it faster (remember the axiom, “you can have it good, fast, or cheap - choose two!” - that applies here)).
If you have money to burn ($1000 plus, I guess), you can go to a design company. Use the Yellowpages, or find a site you like, and find out who designed it. Make sure you look at their other work! Get a written quote, and shop around. Most design outfits will have “packages”, where they host the site as well, and maybe even maintain it. That’s bigger dollars, of course.
As j.c. said, it all depends. Let us know your rough budget (hundreds or thousands of dollars?), and a bit more detail on features,and you’ll find plenty of help here.
Hope this helps a little, tho!
abby
Need to know where you are located to give a good answer but my web designer is AWESOME! They are very attentive to details, extremely customer friendly, and cost competitive. Take Flight Graphics does excellent work! They are in California but it does not matter where you live.
http://www.takeflightgraphics.com/
Good Luck with your web site development.
AlohaAloha
Generally “scripts” are what interacts with the users of your site. So if you want to have users fill out a form, select things from a list, or press buttons that do more than link them to another site, you will need scripts. The more scripts, the more complicated your site will be, and of course it will be more expensive too.
I saw the best advice here already, find a site that is similar to what you want, then go from there.
Good luck.
Thanks for all the advice so far. Abby, in particular, has been very informative. I will do some more web surfing to find sites I like, and then ask more specific questions. You have done a great job in steering me in the right direction on where and what to look for, and I am sure I will get great advice as exactly what is wanted gets more clearly defined.
Thanks again
In my spare time I design and maintain websites for small business clients (my full-time job incudes designing and maintaining a large corproate website).
At the prices I charge, a very simple, non-scripted, non-flash website with maybe 15 pages would come in around $500 for an original design. The domain name you can get for $15 per year, and hosting from as little as $12 a month (you could pay less than that, but there are reliability worries).
If you want to use proprietary software, such as Frontpage extensions, Internet Information Server, Windows, SQL Server, etc., you can expect to pay a much higher price for monthly hosting. If you go for all the free (but by no means worse) technologies such as Linux, MySql, perl, Apache, etc., then you can get yourself hosted for about £10 per month (try www.dreamhost.com for an example).
What’s the sport? Maybe I’ll do it for free :). Or another 'Doper?
Open your local phone book & call some people that do websites. Get some local estimates. Most people just say forget it when they learn how much it costs. My ISP charges like $10,000 for a simple site.
Qualifications: I have worked as a fulltime and/or freelance web and print designer for 6 years. I have designed and maintained a large (1000+ pages, 10 servers) site using PHP for dynamic content, and create and maintain smaller sites for law firms, architecture firms, boutiques and financial firms.
When I do a small site, I generally charge about $2000, estimating that it will be about 40 hours of work. This covers initial design of 2 - 3 mockups and multiple rounds of edits; scanning in any pics; meetings to discuss site architecture, client ideas and priorities; final production with HTML, javascript and perl.
Updates I charge about $50/hr; generally I can do them so quickly that any lasting beyond 15 minutes is quite rare. If saomeone wanted updates every day but they were minor I’d probably offer a flat fee of $100/month or so.
for the hosting id recommend icdsoft.com. 50 bucks for the whole year for a .com and really good hosting.
The sport is swimming, which becomes slightly popular every four years. I appreciate the information and will pass it along.