To build a site like this. [Ball park figure] Also, how long do you think it would take? oDesk.com I apologize if this isn't the best place for this thread, feel free to move it.
If your just talking about the design and coding it shouldn't be long at all, especially if you find some qualified individuals to get that done. I can see it being built within a week tops if they are working on it all the time. If your talking about filling it with content thats another issue which can take a very long time. Also, if your talking about getting it to be SEO'd than that will take some time as well because of revisions. Overall, depends on what component your referring too.
Well the design is not a very big factor.. but i guess your gonna eat a lot of time in the CODE process.. its the hardest and hassle part.!
Thanks for the responses guys. Yea I'm not talking about the systems to track the per hour work done and stuff.. or even the blog and whatnot. Just the escrow process to secure transactions and the basic way the site works for connecting providers and buyers..
Well then you got to work on what will make that site different to all the others on the internet?. And as for the design etc there is a few scripts on the internet that make it a whole lot simpler but.
You can try to find turnkey job classifieds solutions for your site. I think it would be much cheaper than hire developers..
If you can replcate the functionality of that site (never mind the design) in a week good luck to you. I bet the backend is much more complex and sophisticated than the simple front-end suggests although you will never really know how it works unless you can get your hands on the code. That design will have gone through many approval processes. The custom art-work alone would have taken more than 1 week to concept, tweak, and approve probably at the cost of several thousand. The coding would have taken several weeks or months to test, de-bug, scale, and finalize. My guess is that it would cost a minimum of low five figures and up to any price you can imagine. When I was working as a .asp developer (over 5 years ago) I worked on tons of web applications where the budget ranged from £20,000-£50,000 and these were relatively small custom web applications, while the biggest I worked on had a total budget exceeding £20,000,000, with £1.000,000 set aside just for the web interface and integration into the backend. While you can get nice work done relatively cheaply, and prices for developers has reduced dramactically, I can't see how paying a developer and designer for a week (say £3000) would even start to cover the real costs of that site. If you want a ball-park figure, set aside at least £20,000 ($30,000) and you might get somewhere towards it.
Here is a link to a project for a odesk clone. It shows everyones bid to let you know about how much you would have to spend. http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/1179479931.shtml