Advice on getting 2 sites designed

glanman

Hi,

I think this the right place to post and you all seem like the experts to advise me. I want to get two sites designed.

So that I dont look stupid and get taken advantage of, what should I be looking out for with regads to features and service. Also I would appreciate some recommendations of sites that you like and are well designed.

I will try answer any questions that you have that will help you direct me.

Regards,

Glanman

Liam Byrne

glanman wrote: »

what should I be looking out for with regads to features and service.

That completely depends on what the aims/objectives of your intended site are.

You're going to have to provide a lot more information before anyone can give you an anyway realistic or relevant response.

D.W

Glanman-really depends on what you are looking for. Are you looking for a large site, a small brochure type site or a CMS (content managed system) to allow you easily add more content to your site?
Basic requirements would be a Search Engine Friendly site, clear layout, crisp looking, good url structure (seo friendly) control of the domain names and hosting, all pages metatagged correctly, alt tags on images and ease of navigation throughout the sites. May be more suggestion but those are a basic few.

John_Mc

I would insist on a standards compliant website developed using best practices, and is fully cross browser compatible so that it looks and works the same in all major browsers.

I'd look for samples of previous work and references from previous clients as that would give a good indication of what their like.

glanman

Ok one is a B2B company, in the Air Con industry. I would like it to raise awareness and show the company in a good light. It is crap at the moment and would put anybody interested off us even though we have some great clients and are one of the industry leaders. It would need 6/7 pages with most technical info accessible from suppliers sites which would be linked (or should I get this technical info included on mine even though it would just be a rehashing of my suppliers info)

The other is for a start up company targeting school principals. It will contain case studies, promotional material and again will be used to raise awareness rather than drive sales.

I would like to be able to manage the content especially on the second one to update it with press releases etc... It would need the capabilities to be used as an interactive tool in the future as well

louie

For the above requirements, best to have the 2 websites developed around a database system, giving you the option to maintain the content (update, ad & remove) as need it.

glanman

Can you explain "a database system" please

Axwell

glanman wrote: »

Can you explain "a database system" please

Basically these days a lot of people want to be able to update their content on their websites regularly and to do so requires some sort of database where you can go in and edit, update, delete content etc. Most come in the form of a CMS (Content Management System) where the site would be built around that but you would have the ability to go in and change the text and images etc as you wanted, say to update the enws section or change a product or information.

louie

A database system, is like a storage box.
you put everything in there (in our case content), and based on the website request, you display the content related.

glanman

Thanks to all who replied. I have got a few quotes but have a few more questions:

How much will I be charged to host the site after year one? It says free for year one. My domain is already registered.

One is quoting a charge of €550 to supply a CMS including "training to get the most out of your CMS". This seems pricey in the overall scheme of the site which is quoting in and around €1,400

Liam Byrne

glanman wrote: »

How much will I be charged to host the site after year one? It says free for year one. My domain is already registered.

Depends on site features and traffic. Without going too far into it and having a discussion on hosting (against the charter) a typical guideline might be:

1) Standard Hosting : 50 - 100 per year
2) Hosting with PHP & MySQL and more space : 100 - 200 per year
3) Lots of storage space and associated bandwidth : 300 - 800
4) Dedicated server (whole other ball-game for very intensive sites)

glanman wrote: »

One is quoting a charge of €550 to supply a CMS including "training to get the most out of your CMS". This seems pricey in the overall scheme of the site which is quoting in and around €1,400

Sounds about right. Remember that when you're editing your site you could do pretty much anything, and so the CMS editor and the site's navigation need to be able to cope.

Having an expert edit a site, where they know what to do and what not to do, requires feck-all error handling; allowing an average Joe Soap do it (where they might try to upload 2.5MB images or paste badly-marked-up text from Word or use mixed-case or ampersands in filenames) requires a HELL of a lot of error handling, and probably a hell of a lot of support when they almost inevitably do something wrong. Not slagging them - no one can be an expert in stuff they don't do every day, but somehow everyone thinks they can be a webmaster

Pixelcraft

There are also some very simple CMS's that have come out now, which won't need much training, or have a large cost associated with implementation. It may or may not be sufficient for what you need.

glanman

Should I go for an option whereby the designer would maintain it for me, changing and adding content when need arises or would the training provided be enough to enable someone within my company to do the job, bearing in mind that there is no IT specialist within my company.

Pixelcraft

a cms should be easy enough for a staff member to understand and use with a bit of training. It really depends on how often you plan to update. If you want a standard CMS you'll pay a higher development cost, but have less recurring costs for updates. If you want the designer to handle it you'll have a lower development cost but more recurring charges for updates.

Liam Byrne

glanman wrote: »

Should I go for an option whereby the designer would maintain it for me, changing and adding content when need arises or would the training provided be enough to enable someone within my company to do the job, bearing in mind that there is no IT specialist within my company.

Use the same logic as you would when deciding whether to rent something as-needed or buy it outright.

Frequently used / easy to use / OK price = buy it outright
Infrequently used / no expertise / high price = rent it as needed

Usually, I offer both, providing most of the CMS framework in the site build; this makes the site easy and relatively cheap if the client opts for me to update it, and offers them the option of going with the full CMS themselves further down the line for a one-off charge.

glanman

Thats what I am thinking, go with them doing it for me, see if its cost effective over year 1 and then considering taking over using CSM if not using their maintainance often enough to justify yearly fee

Liam Byrne

glanman wrote: »

Thats what I am thinking, go with them doing it for me, see if its cost effective over year 1 and then considering taking over using CSM if not using their maintainance often enough to justify yearly fee

Just make sure that they do the same as I do and have the framework there.

It's not that common an approach, and if they think there's absolutely no need for a CMS, there may be a hefty enough charge to reverse-engineer the site to put the CMS in as the foundation.

p

glanman wrote: »

How much will I be charged to host the site after year one? It says free for year one. My domain is already registered.

One is quoting a charge of €550 to supply a CMS including "training to get the most out of your CMS". This seems pricey in the overall scheme of the site which is quoting in and around €1,400

Hosting & domain are nothing, about €100 per year.

€1,400 for that is pretty cheap, and actually on the low-end of the scale in terms of web design. If you don't have a CMS then you can't update the site yourself, so €500 for the CMS is going to save you a lot of money and time rather than going back to the company again and again when you want changes.