Site Development Estimate

Would anyone like to give their opinion on the development cost of an in-house designed site? We will be hiring someone to work from our office in Santa Monica (Los Angeles), California (either full or part time) to build this site from scratch, and I'm doing some initial budgeting now. Yes, we are definitely keeping the labor in-house, since we need to be able to talk to the design person every few minutes as the design progresses. Although this person may certainly use outside support and tools, he or she must still be in hour office everyday.

So if you would like to give your ballpark guess as to the total design cost and time frame, we'd love to see it. This is for design only, meaning, it's just the labor of the person in our office, and any tools/licences/fees that are incurred. It does not include any hosting, maintenence, marketing or promotion.


Thanks,
Bryan


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DETAILS:

This is a database-driven site. Up to 500,000 users, of which maybe 2000 might be using it simultaneously. I would imagine that the site will start out mostly with PHP, mySQL and commerce functions, but it will contain no frames and almost no graphics except for our logo and maybe background color. The closest similar example site I could find is www.cdbaby.com , although our site will contain no multimedia... ours is simply a contact-lookup site. Speed and simplicity are the main concerns.

The site will basically have two groups of users, A and B, each trying to find certain people in the other group. Group A will be the large one, they will register and fill out basic info, and will be doing many searches to find people in group B. I have not devised a pay-scheme yet, but group A might pay to search, or they might pay for the results of a search, or they might pay to contact the search results. Group B is much smaller, with similar functions.

There will be about 30 searchable fields for each group. There will only be a few pages needed for users to set up their searches... most of the selection criteria will be on one page. Thus the site will be just few pages that are database or commerce involved; the rest of the site... maybe 50 pages... will just be static text.


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ESTIMATE:

We are looking for your opinion on what the estimated cost ($ U.S.) would be for the in-house development and testing, and also, what you think the time frame would be for either a full time or part time person to do it.

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