I need to make a website to sell a product. The product will be sold to food companies/caterers so it might be a bit different than selling to the average person. I assume I can hire some programmer online and have them make the site using pictures I send them. Are there good sites that people would recommend? How much design do you already need to have in mind and how much will they design the site?

Thanks

The golden rule here is to ask any potential designers to see a portfolio of their work. If their work looks good and you'd be happy with something similar you can't go too wrong.

You won't find many good designers out there for cheap, you might, but probably not. A good one here in the UK who is freelance will cost you anything from £20p/h to £50p/h. In current times someone quoting £10-£15p/h might not actually be that bad.

A lot of designers tend to over estimate their ability and overcharge as well, watch out for that. It's not that they are trying to scam you, it's just they think they are wonderful when they don't really produce any decent work (they always seem to get the jobs as well lol )

I'd stay away from web design firms. Every single one I've seen has pretty much produced endless pieces of crap. There are good ones out there again, but they are rare.

So find a freelancer on some website, local ad, ask to see examples of their recent work, if you like it get a quote. The amount of design you need is totally dependant. The more you can give them as resources the quicker they will take to make it as they will have more focus.

Good luck anyway!

check out Vworker.com. Used to be rentacoder.com

you can post a project bid and it will appear before literally thousands of coders from all over the world.

they are extremely cheap and my experience with coders there have been excellent. everything is safe, you put money in an escrow account and you don't release the funds to the coder until you are satisfied with the project.

We just built 2 new sites using WordPress and consultants we found at ELANCE.

ELANCE charges $10 to join and once you join you can post unlimited job proposals to their board and consultants from all over the world will reply.

We had over 100 responses to our first job posting and hired 2 consultants from India to consult with us over Skype. We used the Skype screen sharing tool so the consultant could see our work and direct us so that they didn't have access to our site and we actually built the site with no previous web site experience.

The 2 we chose speak very good English and we pay them $25 per hour for talent that would cost over $100 per hour here. We saw offers of this service ranging from $10 to $75 per hour and chose ours based on our judgement of technical competence and their ability to speak clear English.

We chose Yahoo to host the site and provide the E-commerce "store" and PayPal Web Payments Pro to provide the merchant services to take the credit card orders and collect the money and transfer it to our bank account. The costs for hosting, store and merchant services total about $80 per month plus transaction fees of around 4%.

Thanks for the replies. About how much should we expect to spend. I don't have a feel for if it takes most coders 5 hours or 50 hours to do a normal website. I don't anticipate this being anything complicated so you can just assume an average, basic website.

Thanks for the estimates.

I am looking for someone right now. Can you tell me the username of the guys you used?

yea, every time i've looked for web quotes it seems i've gotten really high hours for pretty simple stuff. If anybody is knowledgeable/can give insight to, what would it cost to make (lets use a new yay! site for example) a site like groupon. Seems fairly simple/clean, relatively few pages, not too many layers, etc. Obv there is some db work in there would take a bunch of time, but still, about how many hours should it take?

How about something less simple? more flash, drop down menus, etc.?

I know obv nobody can say exactly "it will take X hours to build a perfect groupon clone!", but do these sites take 50 hours? hundreds? thousands?

Anybody with some knowledge on it would be really awsome, all the web devs I know personally seem to be pretty bad at being able to give good quotes :-p, so any insight would be great. It's weird that I can give pretty decent quotes for like any coding project, but yet be so totally clueless on web dev.

sigh, all my posts turn into rambles

/rant

thanks

I have had really good luck with a guy named Puneet Lakhani his email is puneetlakhani@gmail.com he runs a stable of seemingly very competent developers. The guy I am using is named Anuj and so far I am very pleased they have completed 2 jobs for me and I am happy with the communication, the price and the attitude of both Puneet and Anuj.

We talk and screen share over skype and I pay them $25 per hour via PayPal. They give me estimates for jobs and by the hour for consulting.

If you have further questions about this feel free to PM.

My advice would be to stay away from Flash unless there really is a niche you need to use it in. It's going to die eventually, it's going to lose it's momentum shortly and it comes with a host of negative side effects.

Groupon looks like quite a simple site as far as dynamic sites go. Again, the better your spec is, the more accurate the quotes you will get will be. If I had to guess though the ballpark would be 6 weeks full time work (includes contingency) for something decent and functional. These sorts of sites can easily become the never ending project as there is so much more you can add to them.

You should also be aware that running a site like that is also a commitment and you will probably plan for some running costs with the developer for new features etc.

On larger sites, if you are not happy with the developers quality of work or have communication difficulties within the first week or two, it's also better to cut your losses and find someone you are happy with.

grunching:

Design and development are different, it is extremely rare to find somebody who can do them both well. You want to find a designer to design the site and then a developer to create what that person has designed.

When you say design what you mean is development and you are ignoring design altogether. To design a website is basically to use electronic crayons to plan what it will look like. Nothing more.

99designs.com is excellent for designs. You create a contest and a bunch of designers compete and you choose the best one.

For development you can use a site like elance.com or rentacoder.com - be sure to view stuff that they have done in the past and make sure they did the whole site.

Designers are a dime a dozen and low paid and as long as you like what they send you its fine. Good developers are rare and you need to be careful about selecting a good one if the project is important to you.

These are two really important points and the first is something that it seems like you may struggle with. If all you say to the programmer in your spec sheet is that you want him to build a full site and youll give him the pictures, youll get a quote that isnt accurate and the whole process is going to be a mess because he wont know what you want and it will probably take a lot of going back and forth to get it even somewhat sorted out, costing you a lot of time and money

here is a really good post made by the OP of the thread http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30...gn-etc-817250/

The second point Gullanian made is also incredibly important and as I have more experience hiring developers, I realize how important it is to find reliable ones. If you have any serious communication issues or antyhing like that in the first week, try to fix it, but if nothing changes, get rid of the programmer. It will only get more difficult and not only will it waste time but it is incredibly stressful to deal with as well. Also, before accepting a proposal, make sure you get a few bids and talk to all of the serious ones first. You need to discuss the proposal and make sure they actually understand it. If they simply say "we understand your proposal and can do it for $X," that doesnt mean anything and you need to make sure they actually comprehend it.

To make sure I understand, coders can be reasonably cheap ($25-$50/hr), but the website will likely take 2-4 weeks to complete (80-160 hours) which puts the cost around $2000-$8000.

That's a lot more than I was hoping it would cost, but if that's realistic I guess I need to reevaluate if this is the right time to start the website.

Would it be completely awful to just set something up on blogspot so if someone is interested I could send them to the site? I doubt it would be good for people finding me on their own, but might be better than nothing at this point.

What is your budget? If you can tell us that, we can probably tell you what finished product you should expect for that much $$$. I'd recommend 20% of your budget be contingency run on as well, as IT projects pretty much always over run.

I don't exactly have a budget. This is just a side thing I told someone I'd look into for them. Last year i think they had sales of around $1000 so I think they were hoping it would be more in the $300 range. It sounds like that won't get me very far so maybe blogspot is the best way to go until they get more sales and then worry about setting up a better website.

Yeah sorry to say it, but pretty much anything under $500 isn't going to get you anything that is dynamically driven to the level of complexity you wanted.

Don't forget my estimate of 4-6 weeks is pretty vague and other people may disagree.

Consider look at a website as an investment, not an afterthought as well. A good looking, well functioning website is like the packaging of a product, and companies spend a lot of money on image and packaging for the reason that it helps drives sales, trust and image. It's important, so don't write off the idea completely.

With $300 you should buy books and learn to do it yourself

^ Possibly, but to make a Groupon type site really can require a lot of experience over anything else. Designing things properly for instance can take years to master (not visual design, but data design etc). Of course that's no reason not to go for it in the long term but just expect it to be a frustrating route if you are planning on getting something up in the short term.

Just to clarify, I'm not that one that wants the Groupon type page. I just need 1-3 pages that show the product and possibly give some background on it. There is only 1 product so we don't need a lot of pages to show it.

Am I still in the $2k range?

If they are pretty much static pages listing product details, and you want them to look nice, $500 should be more than enough! What is it you want exactly?

you could probably get that for $300 if u find the right (i.e. broke and desperate) coder.

yea that was me bringing up the groupon type page, is $2-4k for a page like that too low? I had heard that a site like this:

http://www.quickmealhelp.com/

would probably be like 15k+ish

That sort of site is under $500 for a good freelance designer. I would strongly recommend having the site built around a CMS like wordpress so you can make changes yourself in the future.

My one piece of advice would be to hire a native english speaker from your country. I've hired Indians before cause they are cheap and been pretty unhappy with their services just about every time. Their hours are weird, they don't understand you very well, they are hard to get a hold of and if they don't deliver you have literally no legal recourse.

It takes a lot longer than you would think. I am sure Groupon has a whole team of people dedicated to the website. It all depends on what kind of features you want. Someone could probably code a simple blogging platform in a couple days, but I am sure 1000s of hours went into the creation of wordpress.

You can buy Groupon clone software for $500 or less. The best one that I've found is offered by a company called gripsell.

The site you mentioned looks like it was built on the Drupal CMS so imo 15K is way too much.

If Groupon was just an example, you'd probably be better off separating cost estimations for design & function.

Using a freely available CMS like Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress would probably be the least expensive to get started.

Depending on what you want the site to do and how complicated the programming is going to be, you should start by finding someone that specializes in development for a particular CMS to get a quote for function and then get a quote for the design.

If the design is more important then you should start by deciding which CMS you want to use, then find a designer for a quote, then find a programmer for anything the CMS can't do with readily available plugins.

To save even more money, you could base the design on an already available layout for the CMS you choose to use and just have someone customize it. There are 1000's available for the 3 that I mentioned.