I need some help!

[madmax6]

Sorry guys but I'm a complete newbie with this stuff and I'm here to maybe get pointed in the right direction. Or at least to not get screwed. I'm in the process of looking for a web developer to design a website for my business. The site needs to be a dynamic database driven website. From the developers I've talked with, they say that it will require PHP and MySQL. The site will also require a proximity based search engine to search the database. The information in the database will be mostly user driven which will be entered by my paying customers who are advertising their services. It will also require some type of payment gateway. These are pretty much the basics of the site.

Now my problem is that I have contacted numerous places for quotes and they are literally all over the place. I've googled web developers, used rentacoder.com and similar sites, and used a site called vendorseek.com as well. The quotes I've received have ranged from $600 all the way up to $10,000, so I'm completely lost in my pursuit of a developer for my site.

So I'm here to just ask for a little direction into where I should look for the right person or company to do the job. And also, what kind of ballpark price should I be getting charged for something like this? I would really appreciate some guidance here, thanks in advance for all replies.

 

[uswebdev]

Joomla + mosIPN + Facile Forms or Fabrik will do what you want: User signs up and pays a fee to join. User is auto created when the API notifies your site the payment has been made. User logs in and fills out data forms, which get entered into the DB. Pick how you want the info displayed - or user picks. Pretty simple really, depending on what else you need.

My best guess is the guys quoting you more than 2k don't know how to do it and will farm it out - or they are creating it all from scratch, which maybe overkill for your project.

You might post your project in the Marketplace here and get some more quotes