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Question: Creating a website

cleo

cleo

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 21, 2002
1,186
0
Tampa Bay Area, FL, USA
I'm not sure which forum to post his in, but it's a question, so I'm choosing this one. :D

A friend of my dad's who owns his own consulting business just called and asked if he could hire me to design a simple website for him. Somehow this guy is just raking in the money and is totally behind the times... he doesn't even have a cell phone! Anyway, I said (of course) that I would love to, and we're getting together this weekend to talk specifics.

Here's the question. For all of the little projects I've done in the past, I haven't had to worry about where to actually put the sites because they've been for professors, friends, clubs, etc and have all been on the school servers or mac.com or aol.com or something like that. So if this guy wants his own domain name, how do I do that? Can you get relatively inexpensive prices for low-bandwidth sites? Where do I start?
 
Re: Question: Creating a website

Originally posted by cleo

Here's the question. For all of the little projects I've done in the past, I haven't had to worry about where to actually put the sites because they've been for professors, friends, clubs, etc and have all been on the school servers or mac.com or aol.com or something like that. So if this guy wants his own domain name, how do I do that? Can you get relatively inexpensive prices for low-bandwidth sites? Where do I start?
Click to expand...

Mostly, you have to go to pay hosting for domain name hosting... and I've been a bit out of it.

I used to use http://www.pair.com for my main hosting... but have since moved to a dedicated server. Pair is good and provides good features/support. They are of very good quality/service... and the cheapest hosting they provide is $5/month or so... but they do charge one time fees for a domain name etc...

I should mention http://www.ninewire.com - who advertises on this site. They provide mac hosting. I haven't had any personal experience with them.

If you look around, I'm sure you can find other low cost hosting solutions.

As for domain names... they will cost as well.. and are usually charged in one year increments... prices on this vary greatly..

Register.com is a popular one and costs $30/year.
Joker.com is a low cost one for $13/year... which I've used for many domain names myself.

There are even cheaper, but I stick to joker.com now - because I've used it in the past and it's cheap enough.

Now... if you're looking to start doing this as a business... you can for example - get a higher bandwidth Pair.com account and use it for multiple domain names...

So, let's say you wanted to start reselling that space.. .you could get the webmaster package for something like $30/month or so, and park many domain names to it and charge a small monthly fee to run these sites... as long as the bandwidth doesn't exceed the set amount or you don't have to be updating it constantly... it would work out. I think pair actually encourages it, so long as one person has access to the account only.

I'm sure you can do this with other hosting as well... but it's just a long term option if you plan on expanding.

arn
 
Arn,

Thanks for the links. OK, lemme try to get this straight. So you first buy a domain name, and there are a number of places you can do that from. But that company doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the actual website. Then you go find another company and buy server space there, and they use the domain name you bought. Is that the basic process?

And, is there anything to look out for when selecting a hosting company? Are all of them Mac-compatible? (I'm assuming you just upload your files via FTP...)
 
Originally posted by cleo
Arn,

Thanks for the links. OK, lemme try to get this straight. So you first buy a domain name, and there are a number of places you can do that from. But that company doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the actual website. Then you go find another company and buy server space there, and they use the domain name you bought. Is that the basic process?
Click to expand...

Right...

The place you buy the domain name from isn't necessarily the same place as you rent/lease hosting from. It can be... like pair.com offers domain names as well... but doesn't have to be. A good side effect of this is that you aren't "locked" into hosting at any one company.

For example, if I suddenly disliked my current host, I could always move Macrumors.com to another ISP. I control the domain name.

arn
 
Cleo, you also want to look carefully at what the different ISPs offer in terms of cgi scripts and options. Is this guy going to need email addresses, etc. Also it will end up costing more if you want to have a online store, but there are also 3rd Parties who handle that, and are usually cheap. Ask Arn about that one, I think that's what he's got to sell the mugs and shirts for MacRumors.

What sort of site does he want? How many pages do you think and how often will it need to be updated?

D
 
He said he wants something relatively simple: contact information, portfolio of clients, etc. He's in accounting/estimating, so there's not really a product to sell. Maybe 10 pages, straight HTML (or XML, if I do my homework :)). Probably email forwarding to his current RoadRunner email. Basically just something small and professional looking to have a URL on his business card. At least that's the impression I got from talking to him on the phone. He doesn't have any employees or anything, so we're talking super-simple.

I checked out Pair's services, and it seems pretty good, based on my limited understanding of how this works.

Oh, another (big) question... how much should I charge him? Clearly, I'm not in this to live off of it, but I also don't want to sell myself short.
 
$$$

So, just to grab your attention again...

How does one typically charge for designing a website? Do you do it by the hour, or figure out basic guidelines for what the client wants and then give a lump sum estimate? Either way, what's the going rate?
 
Re: $$$

Originally posted by cleo
So, just to grab your attention again...

How does one typically charge for designing a website? Do you do it by the hour, or figure out basic guidelines for what the client wants and then give a lump sum estimate? Either way, what's the going rate?
Click to expand...

per hour usually....I got $25/hr doing www.scharffenberger.com (note that it has kinda been ripped up since I left...but all my photography is still there...mostly in the virtual factory tour), which was pretty high I think, but if you're a pro then I think its usually like $25 to $50/hr...especially if you're finding and arranging the host and all that stuff
 
Excellent - thanks for all the tips. I think I'm going to go with www.pair.com, as I might have a couple of other small business clients this summer and could easily upgrade to the "Webmaster" account. and I think I'm going to ask $12-15/hr, as these are my parents' friends and I don't want to look too greedy. :)

I'll post when I have met with the guy and have a mock-up. Wheeee, so exciting! :D
 
12-15 sounds pretty good since it is a pretty small project and theyre friends too :D

there's a formula for doing rough estimates that i saw somebody posted on flashkit once....and for the average job it tended near 50$/hr for truely pro level work with 3 people on the job (50/hr each that would be), hosting, protos, etc etc...at least i think it was something like that...and a part of the deal was that they customer gets to keep the source files which is a pretty big factor
 
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