A custom woodworking business owner recently contacted the NNFP Website HELP team to get a second opinion on a website quote. Using this quote as an example, let’s see how a non-technical business owner can tell whether the quote is reasonable or not.
Business Background:
The wood business produces custom wood products for other businesses. Besides showing examples of basic models and previous work, the site needs forms that allow a prospective buyer to describe their needs in sized, types of woods, etc. The forms that describe the custom product needs are the most complicated part of the website.
Quote Background:
- This quote is for the “second phase.” That is, the business owner already paid the developers to review the existing site and make recommendations. For this example, we do not know how much the business owner paid for the site review.
- The developers recommended that the new site be built with Drupal. Drupal is a very robust Content Management System (CMS). The most commonly known CMS is WordPress. A CMS allows the site owner to add new pages and categories without calling a developer. Drupal is becoming more popular with web developers, as it has even more features and possibilities than WordPress. Drupal is also “free” and “open source.” That means, the developer gets their copy of Drupal free and can make as many changes to the code as they want.
- The original website was built in WordPress.
- The NNFP Website HELP Team had already done a review of the site and recommended that the main thing the site needed to be a more successful marketing tool was updated and redesigned content and search engine optimization.
What is Good about this Quote?
Drupal is an excellent platform. Not that this is the only tool good available, but Drupal has the advantage of being build with accessibility for folks with disabilities in mind. So, it was a plus to read that the proposal was for a Drupal site.
What is Not-so-good about this Quote?
- On sending us the quote, the business owner commented that every web development company seems to feel the need to rebuild the whole site. This is an excellent point. The NNFP Website HELP Team had already recommended keeping the existing site and just revamping the content. Since the original site was built in WordPress, the site owner could have chosen to make these changes himself or work with a developer to make the content changes and add more photos.
- The first item of the quote is for $3500 to set up and install Drupal. The company claims to charge $60.00/hr. The $60.00/hr is an entirely reasonable charge, but that means that it should take 58+ hours to install Drupal for the site. This is entirely unreasonable. Even with a much more complicated Drupal install, one 8-hour day, should be enough for the slowest of workers. If you want to check this out, do a Google search for “how long does it take to install Drupal.”
- Programming – Create CSS/XHTML code: $1,800. It does take some work to customize the coding of a website to match a new design. This company is saying that it would take them 30 hours to do that work ($1800/$60/hr). We hope that they will be customizing almost every page, individually, to use that much time.
- Programming – Basic SEO: $1,000. Drupal has many quick install modules available for SEO. What Drupal can’t do is write great titles and content for the site. So, if the web development company is including copywriting, this is a great price. If they are installing a few already existing modules, this task should take less than 2 hours.
- Creative – Blueprint, Layouts, Content: $3,800 – 5,000. If the business owner would shop around, he could find a graphic great graphic artist who would do the job for less than $1500.00, especially since photography is not included.
So, what could be our final conclusion? The folks who gave the business owner this quote are used to working with people who don’t get a second opinion! We would suggest that the business owner run as fast as possible from this company and get 2 – 3 more quotes before making a decision.