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Usually doing business with a friend is problematic.
The price was probably fair, and you were doing him a favor. It was your first freelance job and it looks like a really great price for your friend. You are learning as you go along. You charged what you thought your time was worth. Your friend should appreciate that as well.
If there is not a clause in the contract that it (the CMS) can be licensed to others, you might consider that as well.
I agree with you partially. However I successfully run a business largely on customising Joomla for 5-figure costs. Of course this includes a unique graphic design turned into a unique template from a professional graphic designer, uniquely developed SEO structure. And about 50% of the time is spent on actually consulting on the content structure and all the custom modules that need to be written for each project.Quote:
Originally Posted by Refreshweb
The interesting thing is that I've actually written a CRUD toolkit myself from scratch and the technology structure you end up underneath is always the same, Joomla, Ruby on Rails, symfony or whatever you choose.
Thats why it makes sense to customise a well developed CMS with a large community support. Customers also value that I can prove that someone can pick up the maintenance when I get run over by a bus and that the source code can't be taken from them.
Security updates are a piece of cake with SVN and vendor branches.Quote:
Originally Posted by Refreshweb
HTH, Jochen
You've just scared me. I've been struggling to get to grips with coding, but I'm really not a hardcore coder at heart. I can tweak, make basic applications and have put together a very simple login system using PHP, but the thought of building a fully-fledged CMS from scratch - something that could compete with Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress etc. is beyond me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Refreshweb
And this is why I resort to OS CMSs - plus the supportive community and add-ons make life easier. I understand that is a false sense of security, but with my level of coding it means I can't build add-ons easily, and outsourcing the work would mean I'd be in the same situation as with an OS CMS - relying on other people's code and having limited capability to change/modify it.
So far, I've had no problems, but I've mainly done small sites and am a freelance who does all by myself. I completely understand the insane prospect of revisiting sites to update the security flaws...
My only comment about updating sites using heavily-customized OS CMSs is that modifying only the template and adding modules as opposed to hacking the core makes life easier.
When I started building websites 12-odd years ago - I didn't know html. I was a designer, not a coder. I'd use hot-dog and dreamweaver and other point-n-click WYSIWYG editors to build my sites. Before long, however, I picked up html and started to find it easier to work in code... and life got better ;).
Just because you aren't yet good at something shouldn't justify not learning. If you want the best for your business and clients, don't be a script kiddie ;).
@Goalie35 - Send your friend to our pricing page and that should make him feel better - http://onwired.com/how-much-will-it-cost/
I think $7k for a custom CMS is very low. Did that include any design work as well?
That's an insane comment. I make a very good living out of selling clients an open source CMS. They know what they're getting and they are very happy. The benefits are boundless, not least that they're *not* tied to me. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Refreshweb