Need help with web design for a new Flying Club.
- Thread starter subpilot
- Start date
Johnny Beau Bekkestad
Well-Known Member
i'd recommend you to use something like wordpress(http://wordpress.com/ or http://wordpress.org/) or similar. It is a platform that anyone can setup and host for a few dollars every month.
They have several templates and pluggins you can play around with as well.
Either you make it yourself or you employ someone, 1500 is not a lot of money if you employ someone, i charge 200$/hour at my company and we rarely take upon projects that are below 500 man hours. So i will not offer you my professional services, but in case you need i will answer questions and give you guidelines... for free!
Before you take on such a project think about a few things. Make sure you have content ready, images, text fonts, sizes, colours and a general idea of a design. Make a budged on how much you want to spend per month hosting the site and what services you need.
Good luck!
They have several templates and pluggins you can play around with as well.
Either you make it yourself or you employ someone, 1500 is not a lot of money if you employ someone, i charge 200$/hour at my company and we rarely take upon projects that are below 500 man hours. So i will not offer you my professional services, but in case you need i will answer questions and give you guidelines... for free!
Before you take on such a project think about a few things. Make sure you have content ready, images, text fonts, sizes, colours and a general idea of a design. Make a budged on how much you want to spend per month hosting the site and what services you need.
Good luck!
exneophyte
Well-Known Member
$1500 is pretty high for a basic website depending on your requirements. If you are looking for something that you can setup yourself, you could probably make it work with some major trial and error using wordpress. The flight school I train at recently had their website redone at much cheaper than the $1500 number. Here is the end result, http://www.inflightpilottraining.com. PM me if you want to know the contact information for the gentleman that did it.
drunkenbeagle
Gang Member
Wordpress, you can put something decent together in a few hours. Free.
drunkenbeagle
Gang Member
My employer charges $240/hour for my time. But I will also answer questions for free. It isn't hard, but can be time consuming. Get all of the content they want on a piece of paper, written out, before you start.
SteveCostello
My member is well-known.
This.
I design and develop websites for a living. I currently work for a company that has no SDLC (software development lifecycle) whatsoever. I cannot tell you how many manhours (otherwise known as money) we've wasted by not having structure.
For you, that structure begins with having a VERY well-defined set of expectations already laid out BEFORE you talk to any developers or go futzing around in Wordpress. Lay out the features that you need. Determine the content you need to have. Take a pad of paper and sketch out all of the pages in a VERY basic manner (don't get detailed... literally use big chunky boxes to define content areas/features). Lay those pages out on a table and see if they make sense from a navigational point of view.
Then you can either take that stuff to a developer or try to wring it out in Wordpress yourself.
Much like any other occupation, you often get what you pay for. $1,500 is probably a bit much for a relatively basic site, but once you start adding in things like instructor scheduling, aircraft scheduling, an admin interface to manage all that... the cost will start to creep up there.
subpilot
Squawking 7600
I have a web designer working on the project who I found through this thread. I am very satisfied with him so far. As for Flightschedulepro.com... 1. That is not a website, it is a member scheduling portal. 2. We use schedulepointe.com which is not as pretty looking but is much more robust and flows better overall (less mouse clicking to perform routine task). Thanks for all the recommendations everyone. Always appreciated!
killbilly
Vocals, Lyrics, Triangle, Washboard, Kittens
$1500 actually isn't all that much if the site requires creative/graphic design, copy/content creation, backend DB integration and a reasonable scope of work for changes/maintenance going forward for a period of time. SteveCostello, correct me if I'm wrong, but even a 5-10 page site these days, with ANY back-end work, is going to take at LEAST 1.5-1.75 man-hours per page if all of those things are part of it?
$1500 seems like a bargain to me if there's a lot going on.
$1500 seems like a bargain to me if there's a lot going on.
rframe
pǝʇɹǝʌuı
If you have domestic resources work on it, a basic site can easily cost $3,000-5,000. If your morals permit you to use outsourced talent, you might pay $500-1,500 for the same product. With the many freelance websites the global talent pool is easily accessed. However, you generally need someone tech-savvy to project manage foreign resources, as communication barriers can be significant, and if there's any sort of commerce involved I'd seriously question taking that approach.
The main thing is to know what you want the site to do and have a good sense of how it should look and feel... even hand sketches help.
Try to have your web talent use common open content management systems, because you might need updates in 6 months or 2 years and your original programmers probably will not be around. Using something like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress is going to make it a lot easier to find talented people who can update or add to it, and also make it much easier to add functionality quickly and cheaply because much of what you may think of has probably already been created as a module that can be plugged in, so you're not paying people to reinvent the wheel again and again.
The main thing is to know what you want the site to do and have a good sense of how it should look and feel... even hand sketches help.
Try to have your web talent use common open content management systems, because you might need updates in 6 months or 2 years and your original programmers probably will not be around. Using something like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress is going to make it a lot easier to find talented people who can update or add to it, and also make it much easier to add functionality quickly and cheaply because much of what you may think of has probably already been created as a module that can be plugged in, so you're not paying people to reinvent the wheel again and again.
SteveCostello
My member is well-known.
If I were to do more freelance work, $1,500 would be about what it would take to get a basic site out the door. The number of pages doesn't make too much of a difference to me, because I template all of my sites so I don't need to do the same work over and over and over. But yes... you start tucking in functionality that requires any sort of back end work (calendars, CMS, blog, etc) and it can start adding up pretty quickly. Although I'm a .NET developer by trade, for freelance clients that require something quick and relatively cheap, I go straight to Wordpress and just buy a template. Not worth my time to mess with a one-off design if they are paying peanuts.