Is this worth 6k??

[Bend it like Bourgeois]

Originally Posted by photon

Hm... I'm more a maven than anything else, maybe that's the kind of business I should setup.

Cool thing was the good web companies liked it too because they spent way less time trying to interpret what was needed and constantly going back and forth - which tend to be the biggest time killers/money losers.

[Table 5]

Originally Posted by fotze

You left new york?

no, calgary. new york is one of the vary few places where attitudes are different in terms of this. which is why there's a friggin designer or photographer on every corner.

[Sly]

The site seems alright but I think 6k is ALOT just for the simple template and generic functions that I'd probably could done myself.

[llama64]

A web site is not a cheap thing to do - properly. Judging from the design of the site, your step father could have probably got a better designer involved, but overall it looks pretty solid.

It's extensive for a simple brochure site, includes facebook and paypal integration and even has some nice Flash animations to liven it up.

Theorhetically someone could have whipped up a pathetic site based on a template for a fraction of the cost, but it still would have run 1200-3000$ at minimum. Keep in mind that these things have to be tested across 4-5 different browsers which is usually the largest chunck of the development cost (well it should be...).

I'd say your step-father did alright, especially if the company is doing some online marketing as part of the deal. The code/CSS looks pretty solid to me. Decent quality -- just lacking on the design aspect but it's not that bad.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Bend it like Bourgeois

I meant top end among companies that would be anywhere near this kind of project. For sure anything remotely agency style is a whole different gig.

Most 'web designers' are techies who figure they can buy or fudge the graphics, or graphic designers who figure dreamweaver can't be much different than photoshop so why not.

There are some that focus on SMEs that do great work though, in my experience anyway.

This is very, VERY true.

I'm a "web developer" and make absolutely no claim to knowing how to do anything remotely related to good design. This is why I pair up with designers. A team of a good designer and a good developer will be far more effective and efficient then anyone claiming to be good at both. They are far different disciplines.

[Table 5]

Originally Posted by llama64

A team of a good designer and a good developer will be far more effective and efficient then anyone claiming to be good at both. They are far different disciplines.

Absolutely. Not only are they different disciplines, the type of person necessary for each skill seem come from opposite sides of the brain (which is why I have yet to meet anyone who is really good at both). As a designer, it's good to understand a little bit about programming and development to help in communication, but beyond that, I know it's out of my realm.

[Russic]

Originally Posted by llama64

This is very, VERY true.

I'm a "web developer" and make absolutely no claim to knowing how to do anything remotely related to good design. This is why I pair up with designers. A team of a good designer and a good developer will be far more effective and efficient then anyone claiming to be good at both. They are far different disciplines.

Originally Posted by Table 5

Absolutely. Not only are they different disciplines, the type of person necessary for each skill seem come from opposite sides of the brain (which is why I have yet to meet anyone who is really good at both). As a designer, it's good to understand a little bit about programming and development to help in communication, but beyond that, I know it's out of my realm.

So true. So damn true. I've tried to be the "jack of all trades" when it came to web design but as anybody in the business could guess it didn't go terribly smoothly.

I enjoy working on the design and layout of a website, but once it comes to the actual development I would always hit a wall and my clients would suffer. My problem now is that in my quest to become a jack of all trades in the web world I'm now mediocre at everything. That was a poor road to follow and now I'm sort of floating in this odd purgatory of web work.

As for the 6k website, I have to agree with Table's comment on the first page ... it may not immediately look like a 6k job, but there could be a lot going on in the background. Things like copy development and the flash animations could have driven up the cost very easily. Even a simple flash animation can cost big $$.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by Bend it like Bourgeois

Cool thing was the good web companies liked it too because they spent way less time trying to interpret what was needed and constantly going back and forth - which tend to be the biggest time killers/money losers.

I asked one of my cousins what he does, and that is almost exactly how he described it.

He meets both "sides" and then sits in meetings, checks specifications and tries to catch the misunderstandings early before mistakes are made. He doesn't really have any technical knowledge, but he has always been a fairly social guy and can recognize when there is a communication failure.

And for this he flies all over the eastern seaboard and Europe.

[csnarpy]

As a web developer and designer (mainly flash), I have to agree that there are alot of things going on in the background that many people are not aware of. Thus cost of producing rises

With that being said, this site really looks to be a template design. The flash there is fairly simplistic. I can`t really see the need for a db or really anything beyond basic programming.

I would suggest that your dad ask for a detailed invoice that list discriptions of what work was done and what was actually created. For me, this is standard policy. You can then see what was done and decide if the site was actually worth what he want`s for it.

[dobbles]

Originally Posted by llama64

A web site is not a cheap thing to do - properly. Judging from the design of the site, your step father could have probably got a better designer involved, but overall it looks pretty solid.

It's extensive for a simple brochure site, includes facebook and paypal integration and even has some nice Flash animations to liven it up.

1 flash animation and a link to facebook and paypal?

i agree with all you guys that things like graphics and layout take time, but 6k for it? perhaps its a difference from canada to the states, but around here, no way someone could get away with that site for more than a grand tops. the overall layout isn't original and there are about 5 pages of content. no way this project takes more than 20 hours of work. and if you guys get paid 6k for half weeks work, then i need to move to calgary!

[llama64]

Originally Posted by dobbles

1 flash animation and a link to facebook and paypal?

i agree with all you guys that things like graphics and layout take time, but 6k for it? perhaps its a difference from canada to the states, but around here, no way someone could get away with that site for more than a grand tops. the overall layout isn't original and there are about 5 pages of content. no way this project takes more than 20 hours of work. and if you guys get paid 6k for half weeks work, then i need to move to calgary!

Ok, integration is the wrong word, but that's why I was asking about the extra marketing going on. It's usually not standard to include Paypal and Facebook in a basic site. If there is any web advertisement or viral marketing going on, that could be part of the $6k.

It's kinda pointless to be debating these things without a detailed invoice isn't it?

Just out of curiosity, what is the industry rate for contract web development in the city? It seems custom software development for anyone worth their money starts at $125 and goes up.

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by jayocal

This is the developer's website...not impressive either:

http://www.solarismarketing.ca

Using a "Hotmail" account to contact the firm? That certainly smacks of professionalism also...

I agree with Dobbles, I'm afraid your dad got took.

Edit: For chuckles, click on the links for "Cool things we do".

[dobbles]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Using a "Hotmail" account to contact the firm? That certainly smacks of professionalism also...

I agree with Dobbles, I'm afraid your dad got took.

Edit: For chuckles, click on the links for "Cool things we do".

lol! a coming soon page and a broken link!

[Nancy]

xx

[FurnaceFace]

It's tough to judge this without all the information and background. I used to work at a design and dev company and 6k, depending on the hourly rate, isn't all that tough to get to. Depends on what his requirements were at the beginning and if it was fixed price or hourly. Making the assumption they did everything from the ground up my guess would be:

8-10 hrs for design (initial meetings, complete comps, follow up meetings, revised comps, etc)
4-8 hours for the Flash banner (depending on revisions)
8-12 hours to code depending on what was required. If there is a Content Management System (which there doesn't appear to be) in the background it'll add some time, some time to setup Paypal
4 hrs of testing
4+ hrs for meetings, PM time, and admin.
1-2 hrs training if required

So I've got about 30-40hrs and depending on how much back and forth and changes there were that might add to it.

If the company were charging a fixed fee and the requirements were something like: a site for promotion and to sell my books then the developer might have said "build in time to setup e-commerce." Once they discussed it further and the monthly cost of a true ecommerce site was discussed, the client may have wanted a lower cost and they switched to PayPal. PayPal typically isn't a big deal to setup. You do need to setup the account, and get the proper code setup, test in the PayPal sandbox, and then move it to production so there is some time there.

If for argument sake they went with the high end of my estimate and added 50% that would be about 6k at $100/hr...and I think $100/hr is low for a firm so it's likely a higher hourly rate. If say it were $150/hr x 40 hrs isn't hard to reach. I'd say rule of thumb is fixed price is 50% more than the hourly estimate so that could be easily reached.

Also depends if it was just the sign or if there was also logo design or some print work (business cards, etc) also completed.

If he paid hourly then I'd make sure he got an itemized invoice. We would have to comment all our time and our invoices indicated where all the time was spent so it was pretty easy to follow. I would assume this company would provide something similar.

One thing I do notice is in FireFox (I haven't checked IE) if you go to the "On Q Bookstore" link, the top link banner does not show up on the bookstore.html page. Not sure if this is by design or an oops...but something to check.

[FurnaceFace]

Went back and looked again, the bottom banner is all fubar in Firefox as well. The landing page is fine but the rest of the pages have various problems: the footer text does not show up and the bottom white border bar varies in height. In fact, the footer text is not even coded on the other pages. This seems odd to me, but perhaps was done by design.

[SpireTECH]

Lots of excellent information in this thread already. I was just lurking and thought I would chime in on this. I own a tech consulting business, and one of the things we do quite commonly is web design work. The area I focus on personally is back-end development (PHP/MySQL/CGI). Most of the design work on the pages I do is all sub-contracted out to other firms, for many of the reasons already mentioned in this thread.

I agree with absolutely everything the other designers/developers have already said. I think that's a very accurate description of the industry, and it's shortcomings.

Price wise, I would expect a site like this to run $1000-$2000 from a freelance designer. Through a design firm this figure would easily be $6000. Most firms that do good work won't even look at anything less than that. Really it's because there's no margins there. There's so much overhead involved in coming up with a design plan, setting up a development environment, registering all the domains, setting up the servers, beta testing, editing, et cetera.

Quality wise, I think the site is not terrible. The only glaring downfall to the site is the poor navigation and paypal purchasing system. Without being involved in the design process, it's impossible to fault of the designer. It's extremely common for a client to demand certain features or design elements, despite the designers strong recommendations against it.

That said, there are some faults that I would've never let slip by any website I offered to a client. I'll enumerate them to save time, since this post is getting pretty long.

1. Sites intended to market and sell things to an online market need to be SEO (search engine optimization) compliant. This website uses old fashioned style tables to align elements, image based navigation, no alt text for images, contains no site map and uses old meta keywords. It's basically the definition of hard to crawl, hard to index and will guarantee your site is at a disadvantage over other sites when searched.
2. Paypal check out is good to have as an alternative, but not as the primary handler of your merchant services. Many buyers don't have Paypal accounts, and nobody ever sees the "continue" link that is purposely kept small and nearly invisible. If this is a book, talk to the publisher about getting it into major stores and their websites. A link to Amazon would be the way to go. I know writers who have dozens of books on Amazon, with a lifetime sales total of 10. So it must be a simple process.
3. The site uses PNG images. This is really a compatibility issue, since Internet Explorer doesn't properly support PNG until version 7, which is an optional upgrade on most computers. Limited support is provided, but I've seen IE do some strange things with PNGs. Browser statistics shows that 20% of internet users are still using IE6, so this is a fairly significant issue.
4. Old style "mouseOver" javascript navigation menus, and table based organization lead to future problems with maintenance. Modern style designs utilize a more logical representation between the code and what will actually be displayed by the browser.

These are just the issues that I would call "medium interest."

[Bend it like Bourgeois]

^^ all well said.

[Dan02]

Originally Posted by SpireTECH

Lots of excellent information in this thread already. I was just lurking and thought I would chime in on this. I own a tech consulting business, and one of the things we do quite commonly is web design work. The area I focus on personally is back-end development (PHP/MySQL/CGI). Most of the design work on the pages I do is all sub-contracted out to other firms, for many of the reasons already mentioned in this thread.

I agree with absolutely everything the other designers/developers have already said. I think that's a very accurate description of the industry, and it's shortcomings.

Price wise, I would expect a site like this to run $1000-$2000 from a freelance designer. Through a design firm this figure would easily be $6000. Most firms that do good work won't even look at anything less than that. Really it's because there's no margins there. There's so much overhead involved in coming up with a design plan, setting up a development environment, registering all the domains, setting up the servers, beta testing, editing, et cetera.

Quality wise, I think the site is not terrible. The only glaring downfall to the site is the poor navigation and paypal purchasing system. Without being involved in the design process, it's impossible to fault of the designer. It's extremely common for a client to demand certain features or design elements, despite the designers strong recommendations against it.

That said, there are some faults that I would've never let slip by any website I offered to a client. I'll enumerate them to save time, since this post is getting pretty long.

1. Sites intended to market and sell things to an online market need to be SEO (search engine optimization) compliant. This website uses old fashioned style tables to align elements, image based navigation, no alt text for images, contains no site map and uses old meta keywords. It's basically the definition of hard to crawl, hard to index and will guarantee your site is at a disadvantage over other sites when searched.
2. Paypal check out is good to have as an alternative, but not as the primary handler of your merchant services. Many buyers don't have Paypal accounts, and nobody ever sees the "continue" link that is purposely kept small and nearly invisible. If this is a book, talk to the publisher about getting it into major stores and their websites. A link to Amazon would be the way to go. I know writers who have dozens of books on Amazon, with a lifetime sales total of 10. So it must be a simple process.
3. The site uses PNG images. This is really a compatibility issue, since Internet Explorer doesn't properly support PNG until version 7, which is an optional upgrade on most computers. Limited support is provided, but I've seen IE do some strange things with PNGs. Browser statistics shows that 20% of internet users are still using IE6, so this is a fairly significant issue.
4. Old style "mouseOver" javascript navigation menus, and table based organization lead to future problems with maintenance. Modern style designs utilize a more logical representation between the code and what will actually be displayed by the browser.

These are just the issues that I would call "medium interest."

quality first post.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Dan02

quality first post.

Echo'd. Thanks Spire. Good point about the site map being used for crawlers. I'm usually against those things, but you might have convinced me. How does this compare to using a sitemap.xml file though?

After looking at the Solaris Marketing site... I'm quite surprised to see they used the same template design on both. That's rather lazy. Doesn't look bad, but still pretty lazy.