Quote For Commercial website

TrevorB

Hi,

I'm been asked by my father in law to be, to find out how much it would be to build a site as described below. I've have just emailed 4 web design company's for quotes but i was wondering if anybody here might have a clue as to what it would cost.

The company currently use a 3rd party to run the website and they are charged a fixed % per booking. Due to expansion, this option is proving very costly for what they are getting.



Design and build a commercial website for a transport company that will be carrying passengers. The website needs to be able to cater for approximately 200 bookings per day, 7 days per week.

The website should include:

• Front end passenger facing web pages covering all aspects of the booking process. This will include details of basic prices, passenger accommodation, special offers etc.
• Users can store details on the site to speed up future bookings.
• Users can pay for services using all major credit or debit cards. Suggest routing to 3rd party payment site such as Realex or Sage Pay to handle payment details.
• The majority of the content on the site needs to be dynamic , driven by the backend database .
• The website needs to have a separate administration section for staff to be able to monitor and amend bookings, update website content, and do other administration tasks depending on the requirements.
• All booking data needs to be backed up to a regular schedule i.e every week.
• A high ranking on google is essential..
• This company already has a domain name registered .
• Website would conform to all data protection codes.

At this stage I am eager to price the following options.

1.)Build site as described above and completely hand over to client upon completion. This will include a minimum support period to include usability training etc.
2.)Build site as above and provide maintenance contract to include site updates, maintenance, general query’s and support etc.

amen

All booking data needs to be backed up to a regular schedule i.e every week

If you are dealing with bookins/money the backup needs to be at least daily with the transactions logs backedup every 10-20 mins depending on site volume. You also need to regulary restore from the backup to ensure it works and that steps to restore are correct.

What about if the website goes down. How will it affect business ? What sort of SLA (Service Level Agreement) do you need?

A high ranking on google is essential..

I would see this different from the design of the website as it is an ongoing task that requires constant monitorin. Your website should contain some visitor/page tracking information such as Google Analytics so you can see where/when your customers are coming from

tiptap

I would say you'd need about 20k from start to finish, then ongoing maintanance.

tiptap

should have stated why I think that amount...
if it's all going to be done "in house", you're going to need

Servers, database and web servers, hosting, licensing for sql server or windows if you're using that .. hardware for a webfarm recommended, security certificate..switch, firewall, database and web design..
you'll need good SEO, meta tags, descriptions, page titles etc..
google adwords perhaps....the list goes on and on and on

ChRoMe

tiptap wrote: »

should have stated why I think that amount...
if it's all going to be done "in house", you're going to need

Servers, database and web servers, hosting, licensing for sql server or windows if you're using that .. hardware for a webfarm recommended, security certificate..switch, firewall, database and web design..
you'll need good SEO, meta tags, descriptions, page titles etc..
google adwords perhaps....the list goes on and on and on

Thats true, but it also is not the only option. The traffic of 200 bookings a day is not a lot. You could easily buy some hosting on managed servers and got freelancer to put the site together.

However there is the issue of managing his expectations. No one can guarantee a page 1 result on Google. The method used for those rankings is Google's special sauce.

But all said and done I think this can be done for between 5-10k depending on requirements.

Webmonkey

5k - 10k sounds good. I'd personally do it for closer to 5 to be competitive. However, regarding Google ranking, that can be difficult and impossible to guarantee.

TrevorB

Thanks for the replies lads.

I think the option of using a managed hosting service + using a freelancer will be what I'll recommend.
The option of managing the equipment would not be worth the cost and effort at this stage.

Between 5-10k was what I had expected too but it's good to see what others think.

Evil Phil

Right. Tom Richards is now banned for a week for commercial advertising. Web Monkey, please take note.

Evil Phil

In fact I'm just going to go ahead and close this thread.