Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I have a question - How much time/money is required to convert a simple static page to a dynamic page? We need to have 2 web pages to be changed to dynamic pages. They are very very simple pages. They only list members' information.
Any ideas appreciated.
"Simple membership list" - could be anything from 1 to N database tables (dropdowns on the page, membership types, etc?) Login? Admin (add/remove members, etc)?
Turning "two pages" to dynamic from static involves programming that stores and retrieves data with some sort of user validation (login) as well as data validation (required fields,) then finally outputting it in what apears to be a "simple dynamic page." If they're doing it right, there are mechanisms in place to prevent abuse through hacking or injection as well. Depending on how the data is stored and what resources are available, this can be quite expensive - but once in place it's as easy to do two pages as 10,000.
Yes, that's 48 billable hours. And yes it includes drop downs on the page, 3 membership types, login, add/remove function for the admin. The end users will have to register for an account to be able to view some of the content.
Like for instance, you're saying that these are user registration pages, and once users have registered they can view content - so presumably there must have been a chunk of work for checking that a user has a subscription before allowing them access to any of the content.
Are you including things like that in the 'two pages'? If so then you got a good deal, I think...
Let's say a cruise missile costs about $1m. That doesn't mean that the red plastic button that fires the missile costs a million bucks - even if the button is the only part of the system that you see as a user. It depends entirely on what happens behind the scenes when you press that button.
hth, a.
PS - or if you really are talking about *just* the pages, two simple web forms with no programming at all behind them, i.e. buttons that when you press them nothing happens, then 2 days would be a bit long for design alone - but it would be reasonable if that includes user testing or similar.
And yes it includes drop downs on the page, 3 membership types, login, add/remove function for the admin. The end users will have to register for an account to be able to view some of the content.
Remember that there is a LOT more to just building a page. Unless you want something that's complete crap, then the entire system has to be tested against all sorts of stupid user tricks- people entering wrong data types (like letters for telephone numbers), people entering wrong data (e.g., birthdate of April 31), people trying to hack your system with SQL injection (adding extra code to input data that could delete all the data in your tables if not coded against), while still keeping the database and code efficient for future scalability.
Assuming they had to build the database structure from scratch and populate it with the data, I don't think 48 hours is than unreasonable, depending on the amount of data that had to be added.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 10:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2006]
