Where to go for Website Development at reasonable cost.

[Name Trader]

I need to develop a website at a reasonable cost. Where is the best place to go for quality development at a reasonable cost. PHP, CSS, MySQL, Great Graphics, Modern Look n Feel. I actually have the database already. Need integrated PayPal and Credit Card payments.

My experience so far is NamePros, where I've only had not great designs and almost always been disappointed with the end results. Sometimes the developer just steals my code or just disappears.

My only other experience was with eLance.com, where I found a competent and cheap developer, but they proved to not be reliable in replying to my questions and getting things done in a timely manner, which eventually deteriorated into canceling the relationship.

I would love to hear where you go/recommend for quality website development at a reasonable cost.

 

[DU]

Call a local web development company in your local area and you will get a quote that is reasonable.

Most companies reasonable > Domainer reasonable

I don't know if you're developing for a real business or not but I think most people don't realize that things done properly cost more than you'd think. If you are a quality developer/designer you won't be charging $10/hr. Many small shops won't do contracts under $10K because it's too short to be engaged for less time (especially if they have other source of income such as shrink wrapped software/apps).

Hope someone like @tiawood responds

 

[Keral_Patel]

Best way to work this out is to hire someone for a longer period of time.

This way you get huge discount as well as get a working website that you want.

I am saying it from a programmer point of view.

All buyers want it for lowest possible price and all coders want the highest possible price for their work.

Therefore the meeting at the middle sometimes compromises the quality of work and relations too.

From my experience I have always been working with same 3 or 4 guys from last 8 years and there is an unending demand of work. This way I myself save time on finding new work and I spend that time on making better things for them. They are happy and I am happy too.

Now there might be a situation where you might say that you just want it to get it done one timer.

But then imagine if you have a dedicated programmer with some understanding like I mentioned above then there will never be any problems in your websites. Moreover you can get contracts from others like yourself and provide them great services. This way after some months you are not even paying the programmer from your pocket but infact making a profit from his work and getting the programming services for free.

It has to be something like that in order for both parties to be satisfied.

Finding a great programmer at very reasonable prices is really difficult.

Thanks,

Keral.

 

[Name Trader]

Thanks DU & Keral for your insightful responses. Still looking for more responses.

 

[Keral_Patel]

One additional thing that comes to my mind is that logically you won't be finding good programmer where there is bidding going on for projects.

As you can see it for yourself those programmer are super busy in bidding for new projects and they do bid on 10 to 12 projects per day writing to them and talking to them. That is a waste of time for themselves as well as for any guy who has already hired them for the work.

A programmer should never be in business development. If he can do both side by side then one thing or the other has to suffer. If he can do both nicely then great. But that rarely happens.

Thanks.

 

[mhdoc]

This doesn't exactly answer your question but I find this guy has a lot of useful insights. The link goes to an article I think you might find interesting and you can look around to see what else he has.
http://chrislema.com/the-art-of-giving-an-estimate/

 

[Lithium]

Find a development company that practices Agile Development. That means they'll always stay in touch, include you on important decisions, give you brutally honest estimates for work completed/price, and ship deployable code at each milestone.

Also, like mentioned above, don't expect to find great development for cheap. Good web apps require specialized teams, and may require much more work than you as a product owner realize. A team cannot fund a designer, developer, and quality assurance team (bare minimum for solid development) at a rate of $10/30/hr. Mechanics charge more, but you hire them because you don't want your car to kill you on the road. Similarly, you don't want a poor design to sink your business with hidden maintenance costs or outright ruin customer's trust.

If budget is your number 1 concern, think in terms of trade offs. i.e., "I can afford to hire a developer for this project, but nothing more. Therefore I can have him take care of the design, which means development quality will suffer and the design quality will be less than optimal."

Now, this doesn't sound too appealing when you think about it, so let me offer a final suggestion. If you can only fund 1 portion of a project right now, make the interface. If you can hire someone to construct an html/css/javascript prototype of your web application, you will have a rock solid plan for the future. When you save up money to hire a development team to make it actually work, they're just writing a back end to plug into the interface, and you can tell them "Make these components do this," rather than "I need a component on the front end, which does this on the backend too." Many freelancers can't optimally manage workflows like they claim to. On the flip side, you may develop the interface, look at it, and decide to take the project in a radically different direction. At this point, you aren't tied to any expensive back end you've already had developed.

 

[DU]

Ignore anyone who says they can build a website for $100 imho....

I wouldn't even install Wordpress for that ....unless you were satisfied with default settings on everything, no plugins, and no support.

Depending on your site find someone who uses a CMS already or a framework whether it be Drupal, Joomla, WP, CakePHP, RoR, Umbraco, Grails, Symfony, or something else. Ask them why they picked what they picked and how it would handle yout top 5 future enhancements you might want and if they expect any issues someone else taking over (consider upgrades and new releases as well etc, consider future theming etc.)

Bespoke software might be the wrong option

 

[Name Trader]

OK. I hear what you are saying DU. Does Laraval PHP Framework fall into the category you describe? I look at their webpage, but it was all gibberish to me.

 

[DU]

OK. I hear what you are saying DU. Does Laraval PHP Framework fall into the category you describe? I look at their webpage, but it was all gibberish to me.

http://maxoffsky.com/code-blog/top-5-trends-laravels-rise-2014/

Don't ask for a Top 3. 50 people will give you 50 different answers


The key is that as you know nothing - you need something that others can take over. This is still going to be more development than using a Wordpress, Joomla, Umbraco etc. as it's just a framework. If someone suggested that just ask why Someone equally talented may use RoR which is fine as well (might be more difficult to get setup on shared hosting), some may like Dot Net Nuke or Umbraco and they like Windows servers.

Demos of CMS here.

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

I think things like DNN, Joomla are great for sites because its designed to be easy to manage (with menus, configurations and plugins etc).

A key point of discussion would be how YOU would maintain the site once built.. to add content, customize content, change caching, change backup, etc... this comes for free with CMS. It's hard to know without knowing what type of site you are building. Someone who wants to do a good job will listen to you for a good while before making a decision and that decision may be - see someone else

 

[Name Trader]

So it looks like I should feel comfortable if a developer is developing with Laravel, as opposed to just plain old PHP. Even if I don't have any experience with any Framework.

I understand your recommendation of going with a CMS, for post purchase support should the original author be unavailable or too expensive. But I have never been very comfortable with the few CMS's I have played around with. They all seemed terribly restrictive inasmuch as to what pigeon-hole they allowed a page to be posted to. But bear in mind I'm only a learner with all CMS's.

I would feel more comfortable reading/editing PHP code than dabbling through a complicated CMS to make corrections/fix problems. I've always found CMS's extremely difficult to fathom out, and I think I am a logical thinker

 

[carob]

This doesn't exactly answer your question but I find this guy has a lot of useful insights. The link goes to an article I think you might find interesting and you can look around to see what else he has.
http://chrislema.com/the-art-of-giving-an-estimate/

That link is excellent, thanks.

I would love to hear where you go/recommend for quality website development at a reasonable cost.

Local. Portfolio, reputation, references, rapport, reliability.

Rapport is a lot of what that link above discusses - meeting in person really helps. Also as it says, you really need to work together to define your requirements before any work starts.

As others have said, bear in mind the need for maintenance and backups and routine updates - who will handle this for you and what it will cost. And how readily someone else could step in and handle that for you.

Don't want a CMS? So do you want to find and open files full of code and edit them every time you want to change punctuation, images, links, menus, SEO features, or add and delete pages? And then find a page or the whole site stops working because you deleted a semicolon someplace? Who will assist you and what will it cost?

 

[carob]

Someone who wants to do a good job will listen to you for a good while before making a decision and that decision may be - see someone else

Really good point.

 

[Name Trader]

Rapport is a lot of what that link above discusses - meeting in person really helps. Also as it says, you really need to work together to define your requirements before any work starts.

As others have said, bear in mind the need for maintenance and backups and routine updates - who will handle this for you and what it will cost. And how readily someone else could step in and handle that for you.

Don't want a CMS? So do you want to find and open files full of code and edit them every time you want to change punctuation, images, links, menus, SEO features, or add and delete pages? And then find a page or the whole site stops working because you deleted a semicolon someplace? Who will assist you and what will it cost?

I understand totally about refining the requirements before any work starts. I would expect whoever I contract for the development, to provide support.

What is this aggression about not wanting a CMS? I have found the examples you quote to be true of CMS's also. I can assist myself to some extent, but support I expect from the original developer. If they don't provide support, I won't use them.

 

[buyselldoms]

I would avoid freelancer.com for the following reasons:-

1. Everyone seems to autobid on projects - i.e. they haven't seen the project description so are bidding blind
2. The accreditation (English, PHP etc) are normally paid for - not from freelancer but in a similar way of buying likes and followers etc. there are people who will do the tests for you at a price, this corrupts the competency assessment process

Other notes and warnings include:-

1. Always speak to someone to determine they understand the project brief before awarding them the project - and expect them to do a little more than simply confirm... make them ask questions, if you get cold feet, choose someone else
2. Never pay upfront or top-heavy milestones... this alienates some decent freelancers and developers, but its an incentive for them to work hard to get your money rather than sit on it. You have to deposit money to the site and on dispute they can get paid if you refuse, a safeguard for them.
3. Pay before getting the files... request a demo whether its a website or design (i.e. watermarked) before considering paying for it. Will normally add a little to the project cost but its worth it.
   
4. Very cheap bid will get you rubbish. High bids are sometimes made as a placeholder to be revised but generally speaking its people trying their luck.
5. Get someone with adequate past experience. Someone claiming, for example, a lot of programming experience in a specific language is good... but if they don't have a past delivered project of something very similar its likely they are unable to deliver or will exceed the timescales. If its too similar they will probably short cut using previous code base and ignore any specific changes you want, but a good freelancer would just make the modifications.
   
6. Avoid freelancers who are working on several big projects at once but still have the time to bid on new projects and communicate with you
7. If its a significant project - forget online-based freelancers... they will just sell your IP to the highest bidder

Its hit and miss, so you will get good freelancers and bad. I have had great success using scriptlance and various others before freelancer acquired them. They have pretty much taken out most of their competitors. Like others are saying, its a good idea to check out a local company... it will cost more but at least you know where to get hold of them if they avoid your emails and calls.

 

[Name Trader]

Useful info buyselldoms.

 

[DU]

What is this aggression about not wanting a CMS? I have found the examples you quote to be true of CMS's also. I can assist myself to some extent, but support I expect from the original developer. If they don't provide support, I won't use them.

CMS are built around end users so they come with document maintenance etc. Think of wordpress - you add a blog post, add a page, you can edit them (it keeps versions), you can have taxonomy included for free. The theming just "works" (in general). You can have comments with plugins that allow you control how it all fits together. SEO? Done... no follow links? Done.. want to change your menu? Drag and Drop... Want a backup? Plugin... Want to include Google maps? Want to integrate maps with your database? Need multiple levels of user access? Want friendly URLS? Want a calendar?

All these things come with a CMS. All these things come tested and configured.

A decent developer will even add custom admin pages and multiple user levels- want to upload a new file? change your source data?

Without a CMS you're relying on someone to handle all of these things. A framework gets you half way there. It forces the developer to follow standards in how to implement your site. It enforces MVC model, it forces adherence to APIs, it gives you libraries and plugins.

Not all CMS are created equally.

If you have a fairly simple site requirement then someone will develop that site and provide you "admin" pages and do that from scratch (a lot of the domain management tools that domainers sell are done this way... but it's time consuming). A lot depends on the relative complexity of your requirements.

I would think something like Drupal would do what you want out of the box but it's complex to get right and overkill when simplicity is needed... Wordpress / Joomla is similar in that it's able to do a lot and get it right quite simply but it gets killed by complexity. (imho)

Theming and designing the templates should be done by someone who can theme properly. In something like Wordpress lots of themes "work". Other cms you will have less success as it just doesn't have the same community focus. CMS will output using a template engine. Frameworks will work with template engines.. custom web dev? it's up to the developer.

Think of it like cooking a pizza:

Bespoke development - get flour, eggs, yeast, tomatoes, milk...make dough, make sauce, ....
Framework - get dough, get sauce, add cheese, construct
CMS - get premade pizza from store

Then say you want to add pepperoni:

Bespoke - find pepperoni, slice pepperoni, move ingredients to find room for pepperoni and add and bake
Framework - move ingredients around to find room, add pepperoni
CMS - tell them to add pepperoni

Something like that

Frameworks are targeting custom sites or developers who would white label their own product or have continual support lifecycles. CMS are better for delivering and turning over a site - and they exist at all levels (simple, complex).

This will be my last post on here because I have other things to do and these are all questions/comments you should get from othes and a lot of this opinion and opinions are like a$$holes.....

 

[Dave]

DU speaks a lot of sense in this thread. I've been commercially involved in web/software/app development for many years now and I whole heartedly agree with DU. I will provide my own ideas later (in a rush now) but if I were you Stub I'd really listen to DU.

 

[Name Trader]

I really dislike wordpress

@Dave - Oh. I am listening intently. But I do have a deep prejudice against CMS's which I'm trying to overcome.

 

[Lithium]

I really dislike wordpress

@Dave - Oh. I am listening intently. But I do have a deep prejudice against CMS's which I'm trying to overcome.

More people should be more skeptical about CMS's. Unless, of course, they just want to manage content.
PHP seems cool, especially the big frameworks, but there's no enterprise support. If you've got a truly unique idea, it's going to be highly improbable that even a seasoned PHP developer would suggest you implement it on top of Wordpress.