£12,000 website???

Question

Hi,

Hope someone can help,

I have quite basic knowledge of website building but my friend is starting a new website and I have some serious concerns. She's paying a designer £12,000 which she's funding with a loan to design a website for her, it's a website where people can sell cars and upload their own descriptions of the cars and also pictures and all she has to do is click and approve the ads through an admin manager.

My question is; Is 12k a reasonable price and if not is there any software that I can use to do it for her easily?

I built my website with frontpage and it's not too shabby but has little functionality like the kind she's looking for.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi, thanks for all the feedback - It's neeb really great, I just called her and she said the website is being hosted by the company, they have guaranteed her 1st page in goole next month (which I know is crap) the functionality will be a search whereby customers can search by distance from them ie postcode searches, customers can load their pictures and car descriptions and it will go through to her for approval and it will then be automatically loaded onto the website. that's all the funtionality she needs....

Answer 1

Bull *hite, that is a rip off, whoever pays that much for a website needs to see s shrink.

Only a corporation would pay that kind of cash, you can for a minimal amount buy all the services you need and emply a bunch of muppets on minimum wage for a month to get the site up and running...

I estimate the setup cost to be less than £3,000 for everything including labour. £12,000 is someone looking for a years wage and do 3 months work, no doubt...

Answer 2

Yes, I have to agree, £12,000 is madness.

You should easily be able to bring in a project like this for a tenth of that. There's no need to own your own server, which might possibly account for some of the money. There's no need to develop a full custom built e-commerce system from scratch - why re-invent the wheel - this is not a new idea and has been done thousands of times. There is lots of Open Source software available that will do the job.

I'd recommend researching the appropriate software options in http://sourceforge.net/.

Of course, the real issue is not so much the £12k price tag but the return on investment. If you're friend is going to make several hundred thousand in the first 3 years then it's not such a big deal. If she's got a proper business plan then she might be better off looking for outside investment rather than a loan. This way she would be reducing the risk to her own capital.

Answer 3

For the design and build 12k sounds like she should be getting the following:

-web hosting on fast free bandwidth UK server
-POP3/IMAP/Wemail email accounts
-a professionally designed Look & Feel, including all marketing literature
-fully W3C compliant design
-admin area including a functional client management system
-12 month budget of at least £400 for SEO work
-12 maintaince contract for several hours a month

To take a 12k loan and not get a second or third opinion?

Well that doesn't make good business sense.

Depending on the geographical location of the business there maybe up to 90% EU funding available for the project.

Tell her to get in touch with us and a third supplier, I'm sure she'll have a different outlook once she has seen what other professionals can offer.

Alloi
http://www.alloi.net/website-design.asp

Answer 4

You should be able to get this functionality by using a combination of joomla and Hot Property (google them both for further info) for considerably less than this. As others have said 3 - 5k would be an expected cost.
However it's more important to look at the business case. What is going to be the unique selling point of this site? There are hundreds of webites already doing exactly this. How is it going to be marketed. Tread carefully. Site promotion costs a lot of money.
Hopefully for 12k, the developers will be including domain registration, hosting, maintenance, search engine optimisation and some search engine marketing. I've done similar packages in the past for people for around 7k.

Answer 5

£12000 does sound a lot, but one thing that a lot of the commenters are missing is the postcode search. That data is very expensive - £2000 at least. So I would not be that surprised that it comes to £12k all told.

I would be more worried that your friend is setting up something like this without really investigating the competition. There are hundreds of used car sales sites out there already - what is this one going to offer that none of the others do? Where is she going to get the data from?

Answer 6

Christ! I knew some "designers" hit the jackpot, but 12k???
I design fully functional e-commerce website with php data-bases and all the features for 1600€ (~£1050) !!
I am not sure you can do it yourself: these front end programs (frontpage, dreamweaver and so on) are crap at making efficient sites, the code is unmaintainable, even unreadable, and it takes as long to learn them than to learn to program correctly.
You better use Notebook and write a proper code. Start with HTML, then grow to PhP, relatively easy and extremely powerful, and mySQL (bit more difficult, but you only need to know 5 or six functions).
Suggest to your friend to go to www.rentacoder.com. She will get offers from 500$...
That's for the design.
She can then pay Adwords for promotion, from 100€/month, and that brings good results.

Answer 7

We do not know the full details. For instance does that price include the cost of a server and all the software licences as well as the cost of designing the site?

The will be database technology and other aspects that may not have highlighted. Obviously your friend can shop around for the best competitive price. If your friend has managed to secure a loan then the lender is probably satisfied that this is a good deal.

Answer 8

Even if it has W3C compliance, full accessibility and SEO aftercare, it's still a little pricey!

Also, you say she's paying a "designer" - do you mean a developer or literally just a graphical designer?

Better get yourself to www.rentacoder.com, you'll get it done for less than £1,000!

[edit] UK postcode data is, for some bizarre reason, NOT free and actually quite pricey. Even then £12,000 sounds too expensive...

Answer 9

i dunno if 12k is reasonable, and although i don't like the idea of taking on a loan to pay a web designer, the site the dude is building does have functionality, and your friend will get her money back when ppl will start selling cars. there are plenty of web design software which u can use, but it's up for the programmer to do the server-side part of the site (which controls the image database, and the text ppl input to advertise their cars). so although u want to help, i think the web designer is the better choice for ur friend.

Answer 10

12,000 Pounds is totally outrageous, until and unless the designing company is willing to host the website in their own "secure" servers.

There are a lot of other outsourcing companies out there that will not only do the designs, but also the coding and integrated secure payments for half the amount, or less.

My company specializes in the same department and we take far more less than that.