Hi there, I'm hoping a few experienced designers, Webmasters - etc can help me with the costings and budget of a website i'm looking to have built. I realise that if i only give rough details a rough guideline is all i can expect - and that's good for me. Oh yes i was also wondering what the monthly upkeep would be - e.g Security, Hosting. Right the website will be of a simple/easy on the eye design. It will have a photo section, where users can obvoiusly post photos and comment on them. I would also like them to be able to vote on them and to have categorizing capabilities. There will also be an identical section but for video clips. For both of these it's essential that the upload process is smooth and very user friendly. The other sections will be simpler. There will be a News section - with direct/relevant feeds. An Information and Article Section, and a Story Section - where people can tell their own stories, and others can comment / vote on them. Again - i realise you haven't had much to go on but if there's enough here to just give a rough guide i'd be very grateful. I have a reasonable budget, so don't worry about quoting large numbers. Thanks for looking and hopefully i'll have a few informative replies. James
I had to deal with such a project some time ago. The video section is the most troublesome one, especially if you want users to post them. You will need a lot of HDD space and ofcourse bandwidth. I doubt any hosting providers will offer shared hosting for such a project, so you will need a dedicated server. I'm not sure about the prices, but I think they are around 100-150$ / month. The video upload will be also troublesome. If you want to support different formats, you will need to install a custom script that will decode and encode all movie clips into one format for Flash players. For that I think you will need a server administrator for a couple of days. As for the site itself. I don't think you can get quality work for less than 3-4K $. Good luck
Given the very weak dollar at the moment I will stick to quoting in £ Certainly looking at virtual private server at the minimum but very possibly a dedicated one. Whilst USA companies are now offering dedicated for £50-75 (with weak dollar) you are more realistically need to budget closer to £100 for when the dollar strengthens again Development costs are very difficult to say on such high level requirements but would have said £2,500 + subject to the video handling.
Thank for the feedback guys. I'm in the process of writing up a detailed spec and may contact you when it's completed to see if it's a job you feel you can do.
No problem, we can almost certainly assist you with the project. If you can send the requirements doc through once you have completed it and we will be more than happy to provide a quote for you.