How much to do a website...

"Undertake something that is difficult, it will do you good. Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow." ~Ronald E. Osborn

There... an inspiring, yet true quote for you. Go for it man! If you get horribly stuck there's people here who will help you out. Again, estimate how many hours it'll take you to do the site--I'm assuming most of the pages will have the same template. Multiply that times your hourly rate, and put it into a contract!!! (You may want to pad your hours a little--maybe 10-15%). If you need to, get a program like Dreamweaver MX to help you code the template (because of time constraints). If it's going to be a catalog (ecommerce) look into oscommerce.com (and oscdox.com -- for documentation). Take a risk--if you fail, worst case is you return the upfront money and change your name!

Depending on the content of the site you could also setup something like www.movabletype.org to allow the client to manage the content themselves. But again that depends on the type of site, the type of content, etc.

go for it zerimar3

just make sure you get the full specifications in writing (via email).

as a side note, regarding selling banners on ebay -- (humm - heathrowe is thinking)
i had no idea... say do you make a fair amount doing this???

heathrowe

Hey man...you guys are the best. Thanks for all the encouragement. I know that this individual has a site at www.silstar.com and today he mentioned he wants to send me some catalogs and brochures as he wants me to do the content as well. So I'm going to be doing the copy writing as well.

My strenghts are in the literary aspect, but I really enjoy doing graphics here and there. But I've been reading up on CSS and Php and trying to get it nailed down to it's function and learning how to make it work.

Malibu, thanks for the quote, inspiring no doubt. Deker, I'm going to look up that site, and thanks for all the times you've posted stuff in the "resources section" on CSS and other things, they're all on my favorites and I've been studying.

Patteman, thanks again for your input man, it helps when you know someone understands where you're coming from.

heathrowe, I was actually on your site this week checking out the tutorials for another job I'm doing. But yeah, the banners on eBay sell pretty well. And once you get a few good customers, they spread the news and you get more. Alot of my sales actually come from those contacting me and just sending money via PayPal so it's not all that much through eBay anymore. *ducks from the eBay staff*

But it's pretty good, because I also do auction templates and you'd be surprised how many eBay PowerSellers want something good, because they're on eBay to stay, but their presentation sucks. You just gotta learn how to market what you sell and punch in the right words in your auction listing to get the hits. But all in all, it's a good deal.

As you may have noticed my animated banners sell for $21.99, sometimes I do five a day, sometimes more or less, but it's good on the side and helps add to paying for school. If you need more info, you can email me or hit me up on messenger.

Well guys, thanks a lot, but we'll see what happens at this point, and if you guys can check out the site I listed and let me know what you think that would be super cool. This guy really wants about ten pages for now, and start adding to the site as we go with all the sub categories, so I know I have to create some type of navigation that can be adjustable for this and I also think it will go into sales as well so it'll be a merchant site of some sort.

But if you all have more input, I'd like to hear it...thank you all and I hope you guys are doing good.

Cheers!

If you're going to be responsible for the content and everything too, make sure you are getting a lot of money for this job... From the sounds of it this could turn into a huge headache, from my experience. When the client has no idea what they want and just gives you the stuff and says "make me a site" be prepared for a lot of revisions, and a lot of work.

The good thing about MovableType is that you can grow with it. Start with ten pages then just make posts to add more. One of my favorite things about movabletype is that all your info is stored in a database, but every time a page is added or updated, it "builds" static html pages. So instead of having like yourdomian.com?page=werosadfaklsdfjaf!@#%@ as your url you just have yourdomain.com/products/boats/. It also makes a very search engine friendly site, since the urls are good, there is no dyanamic code to sort through, etc. Just a nice clean html page.

deker,
I am going to be responsible for the content on the site as well. So I'm trying to figure out the cost and how much time, more or less, I'm going to be putting into this.

I was checking out MovableType yesterday and it was a family homepage, and today, it says it's down but will be restored later. So I'm going to look into it some more to figure out how it works and research it well.

Basically this individual wants a site with a similar look and feel of www.quantumfishing.com and while it doesn't seem to hard, I'm just a bit off guard because I'm not very skilled at Php as much as I'd like to be.

Concerning cost, that's where I get thrown off, because I'm not sure what to charge. That's why I started asking because many of you have the experience. But I'm going to go check MovableType again and hit soem reading on Php and practice some CSS. If it was going to be typical HTML then it wouldn't be a problem but I don't want it bugging out later and having to do double the work, I don't think that would be fair to the client.

He would also like me to maintain the site for him. So what is a good fee on that, and should it be a monthly fee?

Thanks again, collecting this information is very helpful and I'm just reading here and checking out how much of this I can handle.

Cheers!

Sorry I gave you the wrong link for MovableType, it's www.movabletype.org You must have been wondering what the hell I was talking about... You don't have to know PHP to use MovableType, which is another nice thing about it. It's good to know a little if you end up going with OSCommerce or something though. If it looks like he's going to be going with ecommerce in the future, but wants his products listed now, it would be easy to set it up with OSC as a catalog, then "turn on" the order part in the future. Be warned that OSC is a pain in the ass to customize though, especially if you aren't very familiar with PHP. www.eshox.com is a commercial version of OSC that costs $300 up front and $100 a year to use after that. But it is much more polished than OSC and has a very easy template system. Plus you can call someone if you need help, rather than dealing with a bunch of programmers on a messageboard. There is also a distribution of OSC at www.oscdox.com that has a lot of the add-ons preinstalled, and it has a template system as well I think, just no where near as good as the one in Eshox.

Another bad thing about OSC is that the html code it generates is absolutely horrible. Multiple nested tables, completely non-standards compliant, etc. It's really nasty. Search engines hate it. But it's one of the only decent free shopping carts... So unless you do some massive overhauls, you're stuck with it.

If possible a good solution might be to have a static informational site at the beginning, and use MT or just code it by hand for that part so it can get on the search engines and be more accessible. Then have "store" link that goes to the OSC store where they can buy products. That way at least people can get the info on the products and a phone number really easy. And order online if they choose to.

deker, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it all the information. One of the things that ticks me off is when I give information out and people don't follow it, so believe me, I'm looking into and reviewing all the information you give me.

I'm going to research and learn all you're pointing out here to see what I can get out of it, it's hard at times, because I'm more book orientated, where I can sit and flip the pages and see from a bird's eye perspective, so to speak.

Maybe if I had like 5 monitors hooked up I would do better But I'm sure this will be a big help to me. And that first link you linked me to for MovableType did have me thinking. I was looking at some kids and parents and some dudes favorite links and I was like, "Okay, what am I supposed to be looking for?"

So then I thought, "Hmm, this can't be it, but maybe deks showin' me a sample of a site or something, I don't know."

So thanks for clearing that up man, I'll be checking out all the links you posted tonight. Take care and again, thanks for the help...seriously man, thanks.

No problem man. There aren't any books for Movable Type yet, except a few pages in a book about setting up a blog, and the documentation for OSC is almost non-existant (yet another reason why I hate it most of the time!) So I guess you could print it all out or something. The documentation for MT is surprisingly complete though, you just have to read it online. http://movabletype.org/documentation.shtml

The base install of MT is amazingly useful, but it's real power is it has a very nice plug-in architecture, so there are hundreds of add-ons out there for it. Here is a directory of them: http://mt-plugins.org/

The whole system is primarily for blogs, but it can be used for anything. Image galleries, FAQs, Policies and Procedures pages, entire web sites, etc. For instance, this entire site is run with movable type: http://www.adaptivepath.com/ and another: http://www.exploitboston.com/ this calendar: http://www.dollarshort.org/days/

and on and on.... It's a great system.