Forum Moderators: mack
So how much should I offer? Thanks.
Mack.
I recently saw a column from a fairly well-known designer who does blog design for people for $1500 for plain vanilla, more if there are any images or anything. He said he typically charges aroun $1800-2000 when all is said and done. He was recently at a conference and found out he was one of the lowest cost designers there. Keep in mind, that is just for design and integration with an existing system, not for putting your content on the pages or anything like that. Those numbers sound about right for someone actually trying to make a living.
That said, I've seen people on elance bid at prices that can't buy TopRamen, even in Bangalore, so who knows. I guess they're still living with their parents and don't have expenses. I don't know how elance works since I've only looked at it, never used it, but you might offer really low, $500 and see what you get.
Are there solutions for this sort of thing that can be found cheaply? Or would creating this sort of content/advertising management system be a huge project? Thanks.
But remember, design is one thing, programming another. The ones who really know the CMS may not be good designers and vice versa.
Jay
5 to 10 thousand dollars just so that I can easily edit/add articles to my website? Please say it ain't so. This baffles me.
I don't know of anything (good) that is cheaper unless you go through Yahoo or something like that.
Jay
Jay
But for most typical needs, especially if you're not talking about high volume commerce, you can do pretty well with a free open source CMS and hiring someone who knows it inside and out to modify it for you. Like I say, even at $100/hour they might be cheap if they really know the API and can customize it as you want in a heartbeat.
Then to keep design cost down, you buy a template, because custom design just takes time and you should count on a couple thousand dollars for something nice (keep in mind, that's just the template, no actual "content"). If you're not picky though, you can just buy a $50 template and be done. There are thousands out there and it's like online house plans - none are what you really want, but hey they're cheap and get the job done. It's not unique to you but so what. If the site turns out to be important to you, you can pay the big bucks later and have a splash grand opening.
I think the nice custom design and programming sites are generally something only companies with money who already have an established image they want to maintain can touch. If you're just a guy with an informational site, you don't want to go there. I'll bet Jaypro has never sold one of his CMS to just a guy with a few informational pages and I'll bet the person who bids $500 on elance to build you a basic informational site has never built a site for the kinds of clients that hire Jaypro.
I did a simple site for a friend that modified an existing template of a free, open source CMS. I would have enjoyed spending some time to make the site look nicer, but he just wanted to see if it was worth it to him to have a site, so we did something really basic. I was able to do this for $600 (plus $400 in proofreading editing and things like that which he wanted) and he's pleased and it's bringing in good business for him. He can change out images, change the text, update contact info, get email through the site and so forth.
Can someone tell me about using a CMS to manage advertising? Are there a lot of CMS's out there which would easily allow the managment of banners and affiliates? Or would that be a huge custom job?
I've found some CMS's that supposedly have "advertising management," but I'm not exactly sure what that entails. Can someone elaborate?
Your friend's situation sounds exactly like mine -- I basically just want to put this site together on the cheap to see if there's any profit potential, and if so, I'll worry about doing it right later. Don't get me wrong, I actually am interested/knowledgeable about the content, but I'm not going to spend countless hours in the future dealing with a site if there's no money to be made in it.
Someone mentioned that I should pick a CMS. Should I really? Considering I'm not designing the site, maybe I should let the designer pick the CMS...I mean, why should I try to force a CMS on a designer if he's not familiar with it or knowledgeable about it?
You could go the Eastern European or Indian route, but you won't know who you're dealing with and I would think the project management (which would fall to you) would be very difficult. I would ask to see working examples and/or demos of the work and have them give you a timeline of deliverables that you can test before giving any partial payments, and I wouldn't go in for more than $1000 or $2000 in your instance Val. Also I would have them deliver copies of their work that I would be saving on a separate server.
Jay
Ask the designer to show how to make a page or use a template and then send it to your web site.
He can set you up with some blank templates, you add content and copy it to your site.
Easy
You want to place articles online yourself? Well, with using something like wordpress you've got a nice editing environment in the shape of a blog, but that does generally work. You just remove the comment functions and it's an article publishing tool.
That means that what you really need is reduced to a design (and build of that design) for wordpress, and a custom plugin for the ads. Depending on what quality you want the 'boy next door' could do it for 300 dollars. Or a professional company for 2000 or something.
But again, if what you want is more complicated.. then it will take more time and money.
Also, there's a sneaky way to get it done cheap and (hopefully) good.
Try and find a school in your neighbourhood that gives webdevelopment classes or it. Frequently they're looking for real life examples to work with. By helping with briefings, and sitting in on a assesment session you could get a good site.
If you meet the following criteria, though, then you can go cheap with an existing CMS (like Drupal, Joomla, Etomite, a zillion others):
- simple informational site with possibly simple advertising (Adsense or the like that will easily integrate into a template)
- not that picky about how it looks
- willing to do all the content work yourself
- have some time to iron out quirks and don't have a tight schedule.
- not worried about having a site that is not unique, but looks a lot like some other sites out there
- willing to learn some things and struggle a bit with a possibly cumbersome system
- willing to pay for customizations and not start out your first post to the community with a complaint (these are free projects after all).
So if that sounds like you, why don't you check out some open-source CMS and see if you can get a couple installed and running yourself? At some web hosts with Fanstastico, this is actually a push-button solution. Three clicks and you literally have a generic CMS installed.
You can try it for a while and see if you're getting any traffic. When you do, hire someone to integrate some advertising. When some money rolls in from that, hire someone to add this feature or that. If big money rolls in, hire someone to do it all up nice.
As I said, though, even if you only want one of these off-the-shelf CMS, but you want a look that is professional *and* distinctive, you should plan on some good cash (1000-2000) to have a professional design, integrate and set it up. There have been some recent blog posts in the design community about this lately and you can find a topnotch designer to create a blog template for $1500, but he'll be the cheapest of his peers at that price. If you want a totally custom deal from A to Z, then it's more.
The one thing to know is that informational sites can be very simple and "ugly" and be exceeding successful. Witness the site you are visiting right *now*. If all you want is to serve up pages of text with a picture here and there, it does not need to be fancy or unique or beautiful. It needs to provide the information that people are seeking and do it better than other sites. If you want streaming video that gets charged to people at the rate of $.001 minute, you had better be ready to forego that new car for a while yet.
Yes, that would be 50 pages of static content (a how-to guide), in addition to another 30-50 pages of articles that I'll be adding to every week.
For quite a lot of people html is really really hard as they want to stay away of anything technical. Also, it might take you 5 hours to learn enough html to do those simple things (assuming you have no experience with it) and if your time is worth $100 per hour well, that's another 500 you could spend on that site instead to let someone else fix it for you.
There are a lot of cheap alternatives of course, but the question really is that of value for money. Before you decide on a company however ask if you can use a cms they've built before and see if it makes sense to you. I've seen some adminpanels that I couldn't even figure out with years of experience. So it's worth to make sure you get something easy if you're going to spend money on it.
For quite a lot of people html is really really hard as they want to stay away of anything technical. Also, it might take you 5 hours to learn enough html to do those simple things (assuming you have no experience with it)
And the other problem with this approach is that even when you have learned a bit, if you don't make changes to the site for two or three months then go back to do so you will probably have forgotten what to do.
Taking things further, you can buy a cheap server and run Linux (free, again). I'd use Linux over Windows due to the fact that PHP and MySQL require configuration in IIS (Windows' internet server application), but Linux usually comes with Apache (open source internet server app) preconfigured.
Of course, all of this assumes you know how to 1) use Linux, 2) are familiar with your network configuration, and 3) don't mind installing software.
If you aren't any of these three, go with SiteGround for hosting. They have a program called Fantastico than gives you the ability to install Joomla automatically, so you can concentrate on the graphics and content.
Here's some links:
[joomla.org...]
[edited by: jatar_k at 1:01 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
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[1][edit reason] no personal urls thanks [/edit] [/edit][/1]
I was in your position just over a year ago. I didn't want to learn html, I wanted to run my online business. but in the end other people were not reliable about doing whatever I wanted done the way I wanted it - they wanted to do things the way they wanted!
I'd suggest that you get someone to do the graphic design for you if that's not your thing. Get a freelancer is probably the best place to post jobs. Tell them you need it to work in Dreamweaver. Then create a template with that design and then create new pages from that template whenever you need them.
It all seems impossible at first, but now after a year putting up 10 new pages to my site, once the writing and images are done is easy. Create a new page from the template, paste in my text in the code side, then make it all look pretty and insert some images. Once the writing and images are done, 10 pages likely takes me half an hour to create and upload.
I had no intention of learning html, but now I know a fair amount of it and use it quite a bit. But to start with I knew none and used none. With dreamweaver you can use it much like Word, and any time you like you can flip over to the code and see what the code is doing.
