For those outside of the world of web design/development, it can be hard to understand what we do. Why does it take so long? It’s only a website, right? But getting things just right, as with anything, takes time. But while some are frightened and confused by the process, others are outright ignorant of it and, I’d go as far to say, insulting in their payment for the time and skill involved. Here’s an example.
Drupal is an open source Content Management System. Well, it’s more than just a CMS, it’s a development framework, albeit one wrapped around a back-end interface. It’s sort of a CMS contruction kit. It’s modular, so if you want to add a feature or set of features and there’s a module already written to do so, you can plug it in and away you go. But despite that, it still takes time to develop a Drupal site—to write or customize modules for that functionality specific to this project, to make sure all these component parts work correctly together, to design and build a theme, the code the fancy JavaScripts that the kids love, to get it just right. So when a friend of mine saw this project posted on a website where people can find a freelancer to do some work for them, I had to pass it on.
First, here are the requirements:
Summary
We need an experienced Drupal programmer/developer in order to set up a site based on Drupal. Although we don’t have significant drupal experience it seems that most features can be implemented through core modules and contributed modules without the need for real programming at this stage. On a later stage extensive customization may be neededSite Description
A fairly simple portal and community site. The site will have articles, divided in categories, forums, chat rooms and users blogs.Categories
The site must display a page for every category and sub-category. This page must include teasers of the latest articles in this category (main), most popular (side column) and most highly rated articles (side). Also category page must display the latest related forum posts and a link to add a post in this categoryArticles
Each article will be admin only posted and must have the following features:
- Visitors will have access to teasers only, registered users to the whole article.
- Standard features (Print, email, pdf, vote, comments, tags etc)
- Related articles / Read also features
- Picture(s) inside article
- A thumb of the article picture must be displayed in the teaser text on other pages.
- Display of author name / username must be an option, in both articles and teasers views.
- Internal gallery with categories (admin only access) of articles images
- Full HTML WYSIWYG editor for the articlesForums
- All will have access only registered users will post
- Will follow the article categorization plus few categories of their own
- Comments will be directly posted by registered users, or will be checked before go public by the admin, depending on specific user field.
- There must be moderators by forum category and subcategory
- Each post could be voted as useful or useless
- Ability to attach pictures in selected categories
- Simplified WYSIWYG editor for the postsBlogs
- Central page with the most popular, and new blogs (with teasers)
- Users with a selected flag set, or group access, will have the option to have their own blog page
- Link to each user blog though users’ profile
- Report to admin link for every blog / comment entryChat rooms
- Multiple rooms
- Male/female marking
- Ajax or flash based
- Smilies
- Kick/ban options
- Private messages
- Operator status based on user fieldMedia Galleries
Each registered user will have the option to create Galleries of selected media (photos, movies etc).
- Main page for most popular and new galleriesMessages
- Each registered user will be able to send private messages to other users.
- Message length limitation
- Black list / Unwanted senders for each userUsers / Profiles
- 3 levels of users: Visitors, Registed Users, Premium Members
- External page call with parameters must change the Registered Users to Premium Members, for a specific time period.
- User fields: male/female, age, short bio, main photo, photo
- Admin approval for all user submitted content, from one centralized place.Social Networking Capabilities (optional)
- Depending of existing user contributed modules / cost of implementationTheme
An already selected theme will be used.Other Requirements
- The site must be fast (not hundreds of queries per page), secure and SEO friendly.
- Developer can suggest additional (cost efficient) relative features
- Developer can also suggest removal of specific features if they are too complicated to implement.
I’m going to ask around to get some opinions on how long people think this would take and how much they think it might be worth, so comments welcome. I’ll post the actual time scale/offered price later.
Stay tuned!
Update
Ok, here what they said at first:
Budget: $250-750
Project must be delivered within 10 working days.
And then later, after some people have placed bids:
Some of the initial bids seem to be in the extreme upper price range…
Come on guys…
What of the above you can perform for lets say $300-$400?
This is not a cheap site, and it requires loads of development to get this right. Seeing the “understanding” these guys have of building this site I would NEVER ever take on this project or any other from them.
Yeah there’s a lot in there.
I remember recently, I had someone ring me up, who’d been on a weeks long web course of some sort, and was in the market for a website. He’d rang around a few agencies, who’d all suggested building what he was after on-top of some sort of CMS like Joomla (we’re a drupal shop).
Now he didn’t want that, and wasn’t looking to spend any money – or very little, in fact if they were just going to build it on top of something that already existed, then he could do that himself.
He was after RightMove (http://www.rightmove.co.uk/) – good luck sir!
Actually in reality with views and cck you could get pretty close to rightmove – if a little clunky with drupal
I don’t have any experience with Drupal in particular, but this budget and timeframe I would characterize as utter bollocks!
@Tom Skoglund, you can do very rapid development with drupal, but you would still have to do loads of development to meet the requirements in this brief.
Seeing what they think is an appropriate price and timeframe clearly states that they really don’t have any understanding at all about software development.
It is a good example of people you do not want to do business with.
I’d say the job is about 75-100 hours of work, at an hourly rate of about 50 USD.
Thanks for the responses. It’s symptomatic, I think, of a lack of understanding of the work that goes into web development in the wider world. You’d hope this would become less common as the web continues to gain ground as a mainstream information source.
I’m no drupal guy but this is obviously crazy.
Its a funny thing, how does this person (the person posting the job) have any idea on what this would cost? Can’t be past experience, I am presuming that he/she has based price on looking at what others are asking for within the same job site?
When I went looking for a electrician to re-wire my house I didn’t say I want to re-wire my house for £300. I just said I want to re-wire my house give me a quote. I had an idea what I could afford but no real idea what it would cost. If its the site I’m thinking of I think they force you to set a budget from the clients perspective and just about all of the jobs are worthless to anyone living in the western world.
The worrying thing is that that people even bothered to respond!!!
The responses are part of the problem, freelancers underselling their services in a bidding war which devalues the market. I can only assume the ones who do take on such large jobs for such little money either disappoint the client in the end or manage to luckily score other jobs that make up for such a time-cost hit.