Our medical group is talking with a designer about setting up a website to promote our services, highlighting the subspecialty training and experience of our physicians. What is the design/maintenance cost of having small photos (and accompanying bios) of a dozen or so professionals as part of the website design?
The reason I ask this is that when the cost estimate for designing the site was questioned, the web designer suggested that we would have to sacrifice the photos to bring cost down significantly. This makes no sense to me, either from a design or web hosting cost perspective.
Who is going to take the photos? If not the web designer, is he going to have to photoshop the ones supplied so that they are all the same size and dimensions?
I do not know how much cost you are talking about, but although that would not be a huge job, it is not nothing, either.)
It’s a high price when it’s another component of the work for an entire website. If you had to hire someone to add that in later it might just be the minimum price to have someone step in to do the work. Assuming the photos are supplied in digital form and don’t require editing then $1000 is too much, but if the work is being done by a reputable company providing a quality service then $500 might be reasonable, and if the photos need to be scanned and edited, then $1000 while a little steep isn’t all that out of line. If I were in the web page design business I’d be worried about a customer wanting those photos added and not supplying them in digital form, or asking for a bunch of modifications after people see their pictures, and in general having something simple sounding turn into a time consuming project. But then I’d just quote a reasonable price for placing blank pictures into the page, and then a per picture fee for making changes. After all, the pictures themselves will reside in seperate files that can be replaced and modified at any time without affecting the page otherwise.
As a flat web page with no interactivity except maybe links? That should cost much less than $1000. It’s roughly equivalent in effort to making a document in a word processor with the same info.
It’s a ridiculous quote on an itemized estimate. If you are providing photos and they are properly sized, incorporating them into the site is a trivial task compared to the other services being provided.
This would be a huge red flag for me.
ETA: Any decent web developer is going to create a site in an existing CMS – word press, drupal, etc., and deliver you a set of templates and a method for editing/adding content yourself. You should not have to go back to the developer to add a page for a new doctor, update somebody’s bio, or change a picture. If that’s not what they’re proposing, then you’re wasting your money.
I’m frankly surprised anyone would consider building the site without pictures. When I was in the web design business, that was always part of the deal. If the customer provides a bunch of pictures, adding them to the site is a few minutes’ work.
Just to clear up something, adding a few pictures to a webpage can be a few minutes work, or much more. A company providing quality services will assume not only a minimum amount of time for the work to be done, but also time to coordinate with the customer, provide a level of quality control, and guarantee their work. Depending on how the site is hosted it takes some time to install the image files, and ensure that the displayed images have a consistent quality and appearance. So it’s not always as simple as editing a document or just a few minutes work. But as my previous post stated, $1000 is still too much.
Before you cancel the contract in a fury, check with them that they aren’t under the impression that they need to source the images themselves. Unlikely, but you never know.
Just to clarify, the OP said the photos would be provided. If the designer was to arrange professional portraits of a dozen people (as opposed to an iphone pic of people standing against a wall), then that could be pricey. Maybe this is a source of confusion… because I still think $1000 is too high, but that’s at least in the ballpark for what it would cost .
Made a webpage myself and unless there is something more demanding, having a picture with a bio next to it seems trivial. Even with my limited experience I could probably write up an HTML template to do that. Put me in the $1000 is way too much camp.
I can think of about 10 different ways to design and build what you’re discussing here, so let’s get into details.
How many physicians are we talking about? Three? Fifteen? Big difference there.
Are all the photos (and bios?) being placed on the same page, or on multiple pages?
Are the photos/bios being placed into some sort of slideshow apparatus?
As a web designer, the word “maintenance” sets off alarm bells for me. It can be vastly misunderstood. Are we talking about the designer making sure that the web page simply stays online, or are you talking about limited/unlimited ongoing changes? (I had a client that fired employees about once a quarter, and then required me to expunge all trace of them from the site–airbrushing them out of group photos, deleting press releases that had pictures of or quotes from them, etc. Needless to say, this was not a trivial task.)
In general, though, I can’t see why the photos would be a problem, which is why I’m asking such pointed questions here. Something weird is going on, and it’s either on the designer’s end or on your end.
Web developer here. From a design perspective, adding a few photos that you already have should not be driving up costs signficantly unless there is some sort of special case involving fixed and variable costs that drive up the formal accounting costs. For example, if there is a flat, base fee of $6000 to design the application regardless of how long it takes, and all you want is to slap up 3 pages with 3 photos, an accountant might argue that each page costs $1000 and each photo costs $1000. But this is absurd from a strict perspective because you could slap in a dozen photos without having to write a larger check in the end.
If the contractor is saying that there is a large cost just to prepare or upload a document, that is bovinely scatological from a technological perspective and they may be charging you just because they think they can.
If you are hiring them to edit, organize, critique, and seek photos, that may be more reasonable. Are you sure they didn’t quote you a PR service with professional photo shoots and location scouting?
Yes, photos can cost more in storage and data transfer, but for a small medical practice with a dozen hits a day it shouldn’t add up to much.
It didn’t cost anything extra for our law firm’s site. The developer in question specialized in business pages for small to midsize law and medical practices and charges a flat fee for including and maintaining a specified number of photographs. 1-10 were included in a general setup fee.
This was also my perception as I have a buddy who does very nice websites for mid size businesses. Its not just, slapping a few pics up, He has photographer and video guys he works with that are local solid pros in their field by their own rights.
I don’t do web stuff (I am a computer guy) but the magic word in my experience is Expectations. A high end professional does not expect iphone pics they expect professionally composed photos. Just like a mom and pop shop might not mind a piece of ethernet cable tacked along a baseboard or door frame, a higher end business will expect concealed cabling which is more time consuming to install cleanly. Much like their computer systems, they do not want to tinker with their websites. One of my customers, an accountant summed it up nicely.
“I have 2 guys among my 7 employees who can handle most of my computer issues. But right now…its March, they are working on tax returns, and I bill them out at $120 an hour. Do I take them off task to fix a computer issue or have you come in at $69/hour and you will probably fix it faster. This is a no brainer.”
Doctors, lawyers, large scale contractors, engineering firms, etc, etc. Do not want to spend time playing with websites, they want to do their thing billing out at hundreds of dollars an hour.
The red flag for me is them saying that removing the photos would save a lot of money. Depending on how it is done, creating pages for each doctor would cost something, but once this is done, and designed to have a place for the photos, having them inserted is trivial. FTPing a few files to the page is very simple.
For a site I maintain for a conference, I just split a pdf file of charts into a bunch of image files, uploaded them, and modified the code to show them instead of the pdf file. Took maybe twenty minutes.
I suspect some shady web developers, realizing that clients think it is magic, feel they can charge a lot for simple stuff. I said shady - it is not true in general.
What I was trying to figure out was if there were good reasons for it being quite expensive/time-consuming to include a photo and bio for each doc (and thus dispensing with this aspect of the site would be a real moneysaver), or if this was a tactical maneuver to discourage thoughts of a lower price.
I can think of a number of things that would reasonably influence costs (number of pages, fancy graphics, custom logo design, an animated video showing us conquering disease etc.) but a single page with small photos and short bios didn’t strike me as a wallet-buster.
One more possible issue: are you providing the bio’s fully written, or is the designer supposed to gather the information and/or turn it into acceptable copy? That could be a significant job.
I add and remove photos from Web pages all the time and can’t image that it could cost $1000 to build them into a site.
I would agree that the designer might be under the mistaken impression that he needs to contract out the photographic services, which could easily run $100-$250 or so per headshot.