How much would a site like this cost to build?

oatsareclass

Hi,
Can you give me some rough estimates for how much a site like these could cost:

Petfinder.com
AdoptaPet.com

I mean the search facility tool mainly......

Cheers

Caroline

tramoreman

the petfinder.com has about 70 pages or close to it you would be talking over 1k at least you would be better just putting up a web design brief just say what you need in the website

Squeeonline

tramoreman wrote: »

the petfinder.com has about 70 pages or close to it you would be talking over 1k at least you would be better just putting up a web design brief just say what you need in the website

For a good web designer, it'll be less about the number of pages (since you'll probably be using a CMS for something like this) and more about the complexity of the build and the difficult of the design.

When writing the brief to send to prospective designers (such as myself :-D ) you'll want to mention that you want to integrate a user searchable database with multiple fields. It should also be easy to import new entries from a CSV file or manually through the CMS backend.

oatsareclass

I'm not looking for a designer on here as such guys - I have already narrowed it down to 3 , but I have had quotes from €1000 up to to €80k and am puzzled at the major variations . Basically the most important thing is backed log in for shelters to upload their pets so irony have to and the kind of comprehensive search facility that pet finder offers.
Thanks

smash

oatsareclass wrote: »

I'm not looking for a designer on here as such guys - I have already narrowed it down to 3 , but I have had quotes from €1000 up to to €80k and am puzzled at the major variations . Basically the most important thing is backed log in for shelters to upload their pets so irony have to and the kind of comprehensive search facility that pet finder offers.
Thanks

For 1k, you'll get a front end designed in photoshop. There's not a chance of getting that site done for less than 10k imo.

jmcc

smash wrote: »

For 1k, you'll get a front end designed in photoshop. There's not a chance of getting that site done for less than 10k imo.

Agreed. Just about any web developer can do a nice frontend but it takes skill and expertise to develop a good database backend, especially with user uploads.

Database developer/architect expertise is expensive because it takes years to get good at it.

Regards...jmcc

Squeeonline

jmcc wrote: »

Agreed. Just about any web developer can do a nice frontend but it takes skill and expertise to develop a good database backend, especially with user uploads.

Database developer/architect expertise is expensive because it takes years to get good at it.

Regards...jmcc

That depends. If the site is going to grow to be large enough to host on multiple servers, then yes it will cost.

At the low end of those estimates you should be able to get a functional site, using wordpress custom post types. Users would be able to register but only post in your custom category.

I'm not saying that this is the best way to do it, but unless you're willing to shell out ~10k you probably won't get a custom solution.

smash

Squeeonline wrote: »

That depends. If the site is going to grow to be large enough to host on multiple servers, then yes it will cost.

Initial costs should always take into consideration the infrastructure needed to handle growth otherwise you're limiting yourself. Good classified systems do not come cheap.

Squeeonline

smash wrote: »

Initial costs should always take into consideration the infrastructure needed to handle growth otherwise you're limiting yourself. Good classified systems do not come cheap.

Agreed, but there's no point in bankrupting yourself before you start. There's a lot of competition out there and you may not take off. You might have a better chance if you can invest some of that money elsewhere instead of a website that is too big and costly right now.

Just my opinion. I dont have any experience with large scale websites but it just seems to make sense this way.

jmcc

Squeeonline wrote: »

Just my opinion. I dont have any experience with large scale websites but it just seems to make sense this way.

The traffic element is one that really needs to be defined because without it, this is just tyre-kicking. A high traffic/high use site will need a good architecture that is capable of scaling. A small site might not and the Wordpress solution could work.

However for a high traffic/high usage site, different things come into play and a design that might work well with a few concurrent users might not scale effectively. With small scale sites, it is all about giving the user what they want without too much concern for the cost per query or efficiency of the PHP or SQL. With large scale/high traffic websites it is really about giving the user what they want but limiting their options while providing the information efficiently. But that's expertise at the upper scale and it is not that common. The danger is that there is a lot of spoofers who claim to know about scalability and large scale sites but the real operators are relatively scarce.

Regards...jmcc