Cost to redesign a company website?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Marjorie Borchard reports: <<We are redesigning our company website, and I
am wondering if the estimate from a vendor is reasonable. [existing website
= 12 pages (the number will stay about the same), redesign = new
design/look, change 
the sitemap/headings, add some existing or stock photos, link to a 5-minute
video clip, link to PDF brochures and manuals, add a password-protected
section]>>

None of this is rocket science, with the possible exception of creating the
secure section of the site. Later in your message you noted that the server
is hosted in-house, which means you can't do what most people do (ask their
ISP to set up everything for a nominal fee, and perhaps ongoing maintenance
fees).

<<It's a business-to-business site (we sell products mainly to physicians
and hospitals), so while the site must be professional it does not have to
accommodate a mass consumer audience.>>

If you're actually going to be doing any significant B2B work now or in the
future (exchange of money, exchange of purchase orders, etc.), this becomes
a signficantly more difficult job. Because some relatively rare expertise is
required, consultants in this line of work can demand a high price for their
work. This suggests that the real task isn't what you suggested (putting a
new face on the old pages), but rather a fairly complex bit of work
involving considerable "plumbing" work on the server. That kind of work can
cost serious dollars.

<<The website code currently is in FrontPage. The new website will be coded
in straight HTML by the vendor, who will incorporate Macromedia's
Contribute, to allow us to make some future changes on our own. I and others
at my company have enough HTML experience to make smaller changes when
needed.>>

If you're using contribute, and only have 12 distinct pages (thus, only need
a maximum of 12 templates), the design aspect is a fairly straightforward
job. I don't know anything about what it takes to configure Contribute, and
have only second-hand experience with setting up secure sites, so wait for
confirmation from Andrew Plato and others who work in this field.

<<The website will be hosted on a server at our company.>>

That makes the security issues very different than if an ISP were hosting
your site. If your server doesn't already have appropriate security
(software, architecture, hardware such as firewalls) for B2B transactions,
and lacks password management facilities, then your MIS people must purchase
the missing software (through your vendor) and hardware, then must be
trained how to maintain it (unless you want to pay ongoing maintenance fees
to the vendor). That degree of work would jack up the price significantly.

<<From a vendor, who is a well-established multimedia company, we have
received an estimate of $10,000 for the website redesign, with an additional
$8,000 to develop the password-protected portion of the site... Do you think
these costs are reasonable?>>

If the redesign costs are reasonable and focus exclusively on "look and
feel", then I'm so in the wrong business. <g> Those costs would be beyond
extravagant for simply redesigning how a site looks. But if the job actually
involves installing all-new plumbing and an entire secure server
architecture, the cost suddenly seems a whole lot more reasonable.
Similarly, $8K to configure and secure the site, plus teach your MIS people
how to use it, may actually be a bargain, depending on the cost of the
hardware and software they propose to install and what services they plan to
provide to keep your site secure.

Not a simple question, I'm afraid, and thus not a simple answer.

--Geoff Hart, ghart -at- [delete]videotron -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett

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