What does it cost to have someone build a website for you?
 

I'm not too lazy to do my own searching online, but I know I'll be shocked by the prices and I'd prefer to hear from the PPOT folks. Does anyone here do it on the side?

Cost, from how I understand it, depends on the complexity of your site.

I believe services like Earthlink and Apple provide most of the materials for you to get up on the web. Supposedly their software is very easy to use. I'd go their route if that's the case.

That's like asking "How much does a car cost?"

If you provide more details of what you're looking for, and its intended purpose, that would be a help.

Depends on what you are looking for. If its just an information site I would recommend buying a template and do it yourself.

http://www.templatemonster.com

You can purchase these templates for $50 and modify them with basic HTML code.

Echo, depends on what you want/need.

What is the purpose of the site?
To promote a business where the content is basically static?
Will it be updated regularly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly?
Who will be doing the updates, you or outsourced, if you what's you skill set and will you need a Content Management System (CMS)?
Any e-commerce, transactions?
Any affiliates?
Will it need a database?

I should add that I bought GoDaddy's Website Tonight package a few weeks ago. I started building my site, but quickly lost patience. Basically, I want a way to get my blog picked up by search engines, drive traffic to my eBay store and affiliate marketing links. I don't really plan on eCommerce or direct selling. I just want the site as sort of a home base for my online activity. I've made about $200 in the last few weeks through affiliate sales with only two Google Ads. But my Google Ads costs are outpacing my sales, so I'm bleeding money. I'd rather drive traffic to my own site (I realize it will never compete with Google's volume), just to be able to do some more affiliate marketing without racking up ad costs per click on Google.

A client and good buddy of mine started a hockey blog and the very day he made it live, Ted Leonsis (of AOL) picked it up and linked to it on the Caps' website. That was a year ago and he's just about to the point of quitting his day job. He's getting offers thrown at him for product reviews, lots of freebies and monthly ad revenue. I want to do something like that.

My better half just built the site for her office after having someone fail miserably at making one for her.

Someone pointed her towards Joomla, and she's been running with it ever since. She is not stupid, but she is not computer literate. Between the tutorials and forums, and the massive amount of free open-source templates, she has made a full fledged website by herself, with newsletters, online polls, buttons, everything.


www.joomla.org ;) <---it's free

Make sure you get someone who has some design background, nothing worse than a poorly designed site. Colors, layout etc..

Keep in mind that most free lance web designers are slackers by nature. I had a hard time getting them to return phone calls much less do the work.

Joomla (Mambo derivative) is a good CMS, also Drupal and Plone. Joomla does have a ton of themes available for reasonable prices.

One thing about them is they are intended for heavy frequently changing content.

You can build a static site no problem but it kind of defeats the intent of the underlying architecture.

He did mention a blog...

A static site is almost best built by hand via Wordpad...

Joomla is not meant for blogs either.

Something like Wordpress is better for blogging.

For Static sites BBedit is my choice.

Most static sites run @ $300.00-500.00. If you want to add Flash, or Scripting, like log-on, blogging, shopping carts etc, it goes up from there. Something your looking for, would probably run @ $750.00ish..Ive seen sites for major corporations cost in the $100,000 range for starters.

Rick,
My wife does this on the side. She has done many sites from small to large. She would be glad to talk if you are interested in her work. She has degrees in art and graphic design as well as web design. Here are a just a few sites she has done.
Von
http://vonsmog.com/
http://parkavenuephoto.com/
http://jccrochester.org/

or this guy..

http://www.rustypineapple.com

PM replied vonsmog. Thanks.

Can joomla be used on Apple??

Heck if I know, I've barely even seen her using it.

Here's one that I designed and hired a vendor to program... http://www.notemark.com

Sure,

The Joomla interface is completely web driven.

So all that's required to admin it is a web browser.

If you want to build locally, which is what I do to test stuff first, go install MAMP. http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php

The standard free version is fine.

OS X comes with the Apache, MySql and PERL stacks already built in but if you are not familiar with configuring them in a .nix environment then MAMP is the way to go.

It'll let you replicate your server environment locally.


I have 30 or so sites running on my laptop right now.