how much does it cost?

[oprativ]

hi dagnabit,

i'm just going to reply briefly to your question about the cost of a website. you can email me if you'd like more information.

when designing a web presence, i consider five things:
scope, magnitude, form, function and promotion.

scope: what is the website going to do? what do you hope to accomplish with it? are you saving printing costs by putting your brocures online? are you *also* going to boost your marketing efforts? how many areas of the business will the site impact?

magnitude: how large is the site to be? is it an online catalogue consisting of hundreds of pages, or will it be brochure-ware, just a coupla pages duplicating your company's handouts?

form: what will the site look like? this is where designers come in to choose the color scheme, fonts, graphics, layout and the like. the least of your worries.

function: is this a dynamically generated, database-driven site? are you collecting visitor information? are you going to collect email addresses in order to create an email newsletter? are you trying to elicit and reward behaviors from your visitors while they're on site? will you require real-time online credit card transactions? do you want the visitor to see a different graphic/homepage every time they visit?

promotion: you can have the greatest site in the world, but it's useless unless people know it's there. there are different types of online marketing, but generally shepherding people to your site is a full-time proposition after the site actually goes up.

you can probably get someone who does decent design to cook some graffiks and code a coupla HTML pages for mebbe $30-35/hr. the magnitude of the project would determine the number of hours.

once you get into the backend/database work, consultants can go as high as $70-85/hr. depending upon what functionality your site requires.

drop me an email - i'm between consulting gigs right now, and dynamically generated database-driven websites are my specialty. i also do design and graffiks, and can show you my current project. cheers.

hope this helps,
oprativ
oprativ@operamail.com