I've been thinking about starting a staking/coaching website when online poker returns to the USA. I don't know anything about creating or maintaining a website. I talked to a friend, who has done some website design, and he mentioned that in addition to the web design, which he could do, I would need a coder as well. Any idea how much it would cost in total to create and maintain this website, if I were paying both a web designer and a coder?

It's going to vary on what exactly you want done. If you want a code to do an email list it's going to cost you hardly anything, if you want the Youtube of staking/coaching you will be looking at a huge cost. So without seeing the spec it's hard to tell.

Also quotes will vary hugely from individual to individual and firm to firm. Best to send a really detailed spec out to several companies/freelancers you think look good. Hardly anyone sends out detailed specs, it really really helps so I recommend you do a good and very detailed spec as a starting point.

So yeah without knowing more about the project people are just throwing darts with their eyes shut. If you give a lot more information about the project people could probably get in the right ballpark but whoever posts a price first everyone elses guesses are going to be hugely influenced by that which is why it's better to just get actual quotes with an actual spec.

Thanks for the info. I'll elaborate a little. It won't be an affiliate site, but I'm looking for about that level of content. Some things I would like to have:

A secure login area.

A forum where my stakees can discuss hands with myself and each other.

An area where my players could upload their PT/HEM graphs and partial hand histories for me to look at.

Possibly an area for strategy videos that my stakees can watch.

A general information area for prospective stakees.

A place for interested stakees to submit applications.

The difference between quotes is huge. Not that I have much experience but I have seen more than a 3x difference between lowest and highest.

You have all the time in the world to learn how to do this yourself then.

It sounds kinda basic. You can create a WordPress site and attach a forum to that site and start from there.

WordPress Themes:

http://themeforest.net/

Hosting:

http://www.hostgator.com/

Site & Forums software:

http://wordpress.org (you can install a Wordpress site in less then 1 minute on most webhost using their 1-click installer)

http://buddypress.org/
http://bbpress.org/
https://www.vbulletin.com/



Domain name registrar:

http://www.namecheap.com/

FWIW, there is a feature of Youtube that allows you to hide videos from the public (unlisted videos) but you can still embed them on your private forum/site.

I know the general suggestion on this forum is to do it yourself which definitely has educational value and self satisfaction, but if you want to present it as a professional and appealing site where things are tied together fluidly you need a programmer.

If I see a WP site I'm pretty put off it myself straight away as I know it's far more likely to be an amateur operation. It might not be but that's my prejudice that I think a lot of people share as well.

Detailed spec is good, details like "Possibly an area for strategy videos that my stakees can watch" etc is very vague and doesn't really help anyone. Also detail is key, "A general information area for prospective stakees" could just be a textbox, or it could be a detailed interactive area.

If I had to guess a price, if you wanted something pretty decent you could probably find someone good for $1.5-2k it seems pretty simple enough especially if the template is done already by your friend. Again without details about what you are visualising though this could be terribly off.

I personally think 2k is low, if your friend provided me the whole site in a WELL LABELED PSD, and all I had to do was the integration (take it from the PSD -> completely working site) I would estimate 2-5k depending on what functionality you ended up deciding on. If you didnt have a PSD/etc and I had to wireframe it all up, and get the graphics done etc.. you are looking at about double that. I do not freelance though, and do things mainly just for myself, but Im pretty good at estimating the time and multiplying it by what I think is a fair hourly. Gullanian do you disagree with that assessment?

Yes I do, I think the problem here is that the spec is too vague (keep saying it sorry!) but when you have an item on the list like:

This could be a pretty form that emails the OP which would take all of about ~2-3 hours. Or it could be a big elaborate system. Same thing applies with most items on the list.

Round here you can get a decent freelancer for £20p/h, so 100 hours work (£2k) seems reasonable. ($2k has about the same buying power as £2k over here I think).

Vague specs lead to dissatisfaction/frustration on both sides and unexpected cost. A lot of firms love to get vague specs because they know it will be 4x more work than the client thinks it will and by then it's too late they are locked in.

Cool thanks, I guess the forum integration, and the video management were my sticking points, probably more of a function of me never having set up anything having to do with videos, and only standalone forums.

Forum integration is usually very simple if the developer is experienced in it, I use an old ASP forum (not happy with any .net ones at the moment) and setting it up to be a site wide membership system only takes a couple of hours at most. With the more popular PHP ones it's a very similar process and as long as the dev knows what they are doing there shouldn't be any problems.

A lot of things like video archives is pretty simple I think as well, depending on objectives. Getting a free video player to work from your own server isn't hard (http://videojs.com/ for example), then you just need to have some categorisation in the database.

Thanks for all the advice guys! I'll definitely have to get a bit more detailed idea of what I want, per Gullanian's advice. I'm not much past the brainstorm phase at this point.

If my developer took 2-3 hours to add a form as above to a site, it would be the last project he was working on for us.

Provided that the design is already done and the OP does not have very specific requirements that will require a lot of custom coding, a project like this should cost less than £2000.

That's a strong thing to say and I disagree, 2 hours for a nicely functioning, pretty and well designed/formatted form is completely fine.

I'm wary of this thread turning into a debate about how long it takes to do x, and how much x should cost because such discussions really hardly ever yield anything useful and opinions vary wildly and often are very strong. Debating if x should 100% take less than n hours when x isn't even properly defined isn't productive!

i know a guy who does this for a living its basically sit for few weeks play call of duty then finish everything in a week. he does it to say that he actually did the job for the whole month to make him seem more professional in reality he could do it much faster without suffering in any quality its just that for the average joe the idea is that it is kinda hard.

it sounds like OP wants to have a more complicated and interactive site than the typical wordpress blog, so i think it makes sense for him to pay someone instead of try to learn.

however i think the WP site thing isn't really true. you have to remember that the vast majority of internet users (online poker players too) are completely unaware of wordpress, other than maybe hearing the name somewhere. plus, i'm guessing that you are the kind of person that doesn't click ads, spew your email into sign up boxes and so on, so unless the person is trying to sell a product targeted to your type of person, using wordpress would be just fine.

also, of the 10K most visited sites, slightly >5% of them are made in wordpress, which is double the next most popular publicly available CMS (drupal). so clearly some reasonably professional operations use it.

Between $1 and $1,000,000/year.

I paid $350 for this

http://www.lozendevelopments.com

lozen i think you may have overpaid for that website. Dont get me wrong its fine but that could be created in less than 2 hours if a good design spec was supplied. However its all down to the individuals consumer surplus thresholds, whats good value for some people is expensive for others.

Jpr the thing is no freelancer who is actually making a living from doing websites would take on a 2 hour job at $x p/h.