Cost of designing a website?

Dolby

Dolby

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For example a site like www.bidorbuy.co.za?

Not the hosting or registering - simply the developing?
 
Sucking thumb based on sites that I've been involved with... a few hundred grand.

Depending on the technologies you choose, you should be able to get a basic auction site up for under a hundred grand (provided you can find a tame developer). But the finer points are where the pain and spend sits.

My advise would be to look around for an active, open-source project producing an app like the one you are looking for. That is what I did for my online business.

Having said that, if someone came to me and asked me to replicated what I have, for them, I'd not do it for less than R60k, and that's with the bulk of the app coming for free.
 
Design <> Develop but okay. I'm sure you meant from 0 to 100% done based off of concepts.

Providing you have a well-laid out business plan and process flows and the actual designing phase of the site doesn't take months to be approved (usually a process of about 4-6 weeks) and provided you don't have any other fancy requests. My thumb suck would be around the R160k-220k mark. But if there's no initial documents outlining the processes/needs/wants of the site in detail (not just point to something and say "I want this on the PC") I can't say for sure. That's also the cheapest I've seen people quote for functional sites like that, but without proper documentation, you could see yourself spend at least R500k on it

If you want to estimate the value of a site like bidorbuy based purely in terms of dev/design time over the years, I'm sure they've pumped in a couple of million rands in it already over the years.
 
the red string as long as bidorbuy.co.za ;)

Whoa! As a total n00b - why would it cost so much considering the design (albeit drawn) and planning has been done?
I know where each button when clicked, what it should link to?

I think I got into the wrong business ;)

I'll check the link out too - thanks!
 
Or you can use a site like elance.com, guru.com, scriptlance.com, rentacoder.com (there are a few others) to get it done for a fraction of the cost. There are some highly talented programmers in places like Russia or India that will do a high level custom job for a few hundred dollars. Because of the exchange rate and the average wage in thier countries they are still earning comparitively very well, and you get a top notch job dome for next to nothing.
 
Dolby said:
the red string as long as bidorbuy.co.za ;)

Whoa! As a total n00b - why would it cost so much considering the design (albeit drawn) and planning has been done?
I know where each button when clicked, what it should link to?

I think I got into the wrong business ;)

I'll check the link out too - thanks!
Click to expand...

Converting a design to HTML can take its own fair share of time, but the bulk of the work lies in the "what should it link to" bit of your question. Clicking buttons or links in a web application kicks of complex processes involving retrieving posted data from the page where the user clicked the button, processing that data, storing it in a database of some sort and usually sending a result back to the user. Facilitating the storage would require a comprehensive, functional database being built in any of the popular RDBMSes and some server-side scripts being written to actually perform the transformation of the data and pushing it into the database.

Believe me, its not as simple as "where each button clicked, what it should link to". ;)
 
Dolby said:
considering the design (albeit drawn) and planning has been done?
Click to expand...

There's your first problem. The planning hasn't been done. You would still need to reverse engineer the business process, the links, the payment gateway setup, the database layout etc if you want to copy it exactly. Even then, you're going to want to do things differently. Looking at a website is not a "plan".

I agree with others here, it's not going to be a small job.
 
Shogun is right, there is a lot to think about before you decide to set up an auction site. Probably the first thing that you should think about is: is the market saturated with auction sites already and how well is their business actually doing? You could spend a lot of money and spend years re-inventing the wheel, only to discover that the other sites already have market share and your site doesn't get that much traffic. Even a simple e-commerce site like this one that sells daycare supplies, that I worked on, took quite a while to set up and was a fairly expensive site.
 
To build a web site like BidorBuy.co.za it would cost you around $1,500 USD. If you out-source and get it developed in India/Vietnam/Asian Countries.

DO NOT get someone local to build this web site, they will overcharge you beyond belief.

I suggest you simply do a google search for freelance work.
 
VioAdmin speaks only partial truth... I have a mate who works for a huge international IT consulting firm and they use Indian developers all the time. They are good and at reasonable prices, but the problem is they are in big demand, so the good ones are usually booked out on projects quite far in advance.

If you are looking for a quote though, see my signature link...

John
 
If you do end up going through with a project like this then please make sure the designer has a decent sense of design. I see far too many website out there today that look incredibly horrible!
 
VioAdmin said:
To build a web site like BidorBuy.co.za it would cost you around $1,500 USD. If you out-source and get it developed in India/Vietnam/Asian Countries.

DO NOT get someone local to build this web site, they will overcharge you beyond belief.

I suggest you simply do a google search for freelance work.
Click to expand...

I'll take the bait.

Have you worked with our Indian friends (not the local ones)? You sound like our CIO.. outsource.. it's cheap (on paper). Yea.. on paper. Poor BA people have to send stuff 3 times to them to fix. Example "Line must be centered" like in screen shot. Day 1, is left. Day 2 it's fixed, open screen right aligned, Day 3 it's fixed and QA'd it's on the bottom... Day 4.. NOW it's centered. Edit: You have to appoint more BA people to write specs, because if you don't have a spec you are screwed. We write our own specs 80% of the time.

Yes... the project that was supposed to be short takes x4 times longer. And ALL of them are "experts".

I know "business" don't care about QUALITY of code.. but with the outsource team which are all "experts".. their code is horrific. You can see (in the code) they have juniors working on the product (and you pay for senior people). But business only see pretty screens, where the code is horrific, the db is pretty sheety..
so one day when the project is signed of and released , it stops working/slow and business jumps up and down.. then you realised how crap the code and design was. They have no intrest to write good solid code.. it's only quick code to finish the project so they can continue with next.

I have worked 6 years ago with 6 oakes from India. 1 was clever.. rest.. yea well.. putting a counter to count to 1000000 because "SQL was not ready to save". And it's not a story, I have SEEN the code.

All I can say is.. good luck. Remember pay peanuts get monkeys!
 
Last edited:
VioAdmin said:
To build a web site like BidorBuy.co.za it would cost you around $1,500 USD. If you out-source and get it developed in India/Vietnam/Asian Countries.

DO NOT get someone local to build this web site, they will overcharge you beyond belief.

I suggest you simply do a google search for freelance work.
Click to expand...

I think you guys are greatly underestimating this. To develop a website like bidorbuy.co.za is one thing and 1500 USD gets you really no-where. Off-shore development is always a great risk and it will take you at least 1-2 months to spec out what you want - remember that your off-shore partner will only develop to spec and you hardly ever get what you want if it is not very specific.

With any e-commerce site you will need customer support, a security team which actively scans for fraudsters, a very good payment mechanism, you will have to comply to regulatory requirements (CPA around the corner, PCI, SARS requirements as you are an intermediary accepting payments).

Most of the local sites fail as they quickly worked up a technical site without focusing on the operational support. Over and above you need dedicated, PCI-compliant hosting (as you will transmit credit card information). You will need a dedicated sysadmin team to manage your infrastructure, run security scans and ensure that you are always 1-2 steps ahead of potential fraudsters.

In an open marketplace (unlike CollectiveCow, Twangoo, Smokoo, Yourbid etc) you will also have to contend with possible trademark infringements or distribution rights (such as GHD, FIFA tickets, Power Balance bands etc) or sort out DMCA/BSA related problems (from the use of copyrighted material/images to trying to sell OEM software, modded gaming consoles etc).

Once you have done all of the above you have to still engage in marketing and Google adwords to start driving traffic through your site. In my opinion it will take 3-4 months and a few bar in the bank to start a sustainable business. One can not compare bidorbuy with sites such as Yourbid or Smokoo, as they only focus on the short-tail and their business model will probably fold within the next 12-24 months.

The hosting-cost, dedicated infrastructure, load-balancers, firewalls and bandwidth (in the case of bidorbuy in excess of 5TB per month) will cost you a few 100Ks p.m.
 
so a client comes to me the other day and asks me how much it'll cost to build a site like elancer.com
i give him a thumbsuck and he replies: "why? it's all been built already, you just have to copy the code and put our own logo on."
apparently he had studied some computer stuff at varsity, so there was no pulling the wool over his eyes
:rolleyes:
 
murraybiscuit said:
very interesting post magic dude.
Click to expand...

Another thing to keep in mind: Your customer support team needs to deal with buyer vs. seller disagreements (SNCs on bidorbuy) which takes a huge amount of effort. You will also need to find a payment mechanism which is cheap enough that your transactional charges don't affect your sales (comes with volume and you will hardly go below 2% - as a startup it will be more in the 4-5% or even more). I would not suggest going with a merchant account as you will have monthly costs even if you don't conclude a sale. Try and find a payment gateway which does not charge monthly fees.

Before you embark on developing a site and you go out of business due to operational cost, work out:
- What are your hosting costs (servers, storage, security, bandwidth) - a Thawte EV certificate alone will cost about 500USD/p.a.
- How much staff do you need to provide customer- and administrative support
- Cost of accounting / lawyers (to draw up T&C, privacy policies)
- Marketing cost (SEO will quickly set you back a lot of cash if you do it well)
- Time to market (take all of the above and times it by the months until you will break even - that's the cash-on-hand you require to survive)
 
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