web design agency quotes - ridiculous or standard?

In my opinion, those quotes are a little high for what you're after...although not ridiculous for agencies with a bunch of overhead.

What you're asking for sounds like a strong lander for your home page + a custom WP theme for the rest of the site + integrating a 3rd party cart (e.g. UltraCart) for processing etc would cover your requirements. Depending on the complexity of integrating w/ your fulfillment company could move the needle on the quote a little bit. If you'd like, you can PM me and I'll show you some sample e-com platforms I've done recently and give you a quote. Significantly less than the ballparks you mentioned in your original post.

PS> This is me on Sortfolio - http://www.sortfolio.com/company/7962-rainmaker-commerce
 


Sonny Forelli said:
2) integration with a CRM - I ended up going with ultracart which is a great economical solution and they offer great support - however the interface in terms of GUI/layout as well as documentation is absolute shit. That said - starting at $59/month month to month versus other CRMs that are looking for $1-3k/month with 6 month+ contracts I figured I'd get off my ass and do a little programming.
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UltraCart is really customizable, it's just a pain in the ass to do it (and can add significant cost to the project). I have a feeling they make the documentation so bad, simply so people use their professional services to get customization done. I think they bill at $150 / h or something like that.
 
You're getting shafted. Best bang for the buck will be 99designs.com If you're not familiar with the site, you put up a competition for designers to submit a bunch of work, you give them feedback, and only the winner gets paid. There's a lot of good talent on that site.

If you can afford to, I'd recommend paying more than the average design contest so a lot of great designers will work with you. Contests typically last 1-2 weeks. If you don't suck at life, and like their work, you should be able to get them to design the other pages you need at some other rate.

If you have some ecommerce solution like Joomla, OScommerce, etc then you can get the design made with 99designs.com and hand it off to a programmer familiar with that framework to slice and dice it to work. I've had good success with Odesk, but hear good things about Elance and Vworker

If you still have problems PM me and I'll try to help.


boddicker said:
mods: this most definitely qualifies as a newbie post. that said, i figured people that post here might have more experience with high quality web design agencies so i'm posting here. :rasta:


i'm in the process of seeking a web design firm to create a site for a dietary supplement my company will be selling. the problem i have run into is most designer's portfolios look like they were designed in 1999. if they have any decent work, it's usually their design company's site.

it's a one product site. as much selling as possible will be on the mainpage. other than that, we'll need a checkout process, our shopping cart coordinated with our fulfillment company, and a blog. and minor pages like a contact page and return policy. we basically want the site to look as professional as possible - not outdated - and get people to the order page.

i noticed a lot of people with unremarkable portfolios are on elance and similar sites. so i went to sortfolio and started browsing and found some good stuff.

i've noticed that a lot of the people that actually do have good portfolios are quoting me in the 8-20k range. they're also quoting me time periods that are much longer (3 months) as opposed to the cheaper guys who are quoting me 60 hours.

am i getting gigged here? the agency we want is quoting us 13-15k - saying that anybody quoting below that is not going to deliver a quality product. basically wanting to know how out of line 10k+ is for a single product site.
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Ignore everything posted above & PM Fatbat and pray he has time for you.

He's flat out the best designer on this board, has experience launching products in a related niche & has dealt with the product2web system. You'd be a fool not to contact him.
 
erect said:
Ignore everything posted above & PM Fatbat and pray he has time for you.

He's flat out the best designer on this board, has experience launching products in a related niche & has dealt with the product2web system. You'd be a fool not to contact him.
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Brad's really really good....but is it fair to say he's "flat out the best designer on the board" ? :) <3 You Fatbat.

Seriously, if he takes the time he's a really good person to talk to considering your niche and what you're looking for.
 
I think the key here is this:

boddicker said:
the type of design we're after for our mainpage would be something similarly slick/easy to read like highrisedb dot com or other 37signals sites.
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If you are looking to have a database driven website that has similar services as a project management website, $13k is cheap. If you just want to have a single page lander with no database functionality, then $13k would be very excessive.

The price you get is entirely dependent on the scope of the project and how you communicated with the company giving the quote.

There's a lot of work that goes into building a very functional website for you to maintain yourself that you don't see as the client. Database driven sites take a lot of work to build right if it's a custom job and not something slapped over Wordpress.

Even then, if you are dealing with a larger company, they'll most likely provide you with a ton of documentation and meetings to figure out what you want. Deliverables take a considerable amount of time to create. Most anyone who has worked for a larger company that requires it will tell you that 60-80% of the time they spend on the project is writing all that crap up.

You get what you pay for.
 
i had a logo made at 99designs and it was not good. granted this was just one instance, so maybe i just had a bad experience. making an attractive looking website is surely much more difficult.

those folks recommending 99designs, are you saying i should just have my landing page designed there, or my entire site? what if i like one dudes landing page and another dudes contact page? are these guys basically just designing the look of the website, or are they going to give me all the code/everything i need to get a full site up and running?
 
yubrew said:
If you have some ecommerce solution like Joomla, OScommerce, etc then you can get the design made with 99designs.com and hand it off to a programmer familiar with that framework to slice and dice it to work. I've had good success with Odesk, but hear good things about Elance and Vworker
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about how much would it cost to have a programmer get the site to work?

the thing is, i have a very good idea of what i want the index page to look like. basically there is a page for another ecommerce product that i love. i'd like to copy all of the best stylistic elements of that page and make them and the text relevant to my product. of course i wouldn't want to straight up make it look exactly the same......but very, very similar. if i know this page and know what text i want on the page and where, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of work left to be done appearance-wise to be worthy of a $3k award. especially if i can get a designer to design the whole website and have it functional for 5k or so. after the landing page, there will be a blog, testimonial page, contact page, tos, purchase pages.......
 
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