I was email a possible web job. The website was already designed. However, they are looking for someone to put it together with perhaps WordPress so they can edit it later. I admit I have to learn Wordpress. The pages might add up to 122 pages!
My question is, how in the world do I gather the correct information on what to charge for a hugh job such as this? It’s for a non-profit organization.
There might be a flash slide show. HTML, drop down menus.
I would not know where to beging!
I’ve never done a wordpress site that large before, but WP is rather easy to deal with assuming you’re working with a nice theme and are just creating new pages/posts and plugging in their existing content.
Now, if they have a site and they want you to recreate that exact look in wordpress and it’s not something easily available in an existing template, that might take a little time - unless you can sell them on the idea of simplifying things and working with just what you can easily do with wordpresss.
WP does basic drop down menus pretty nicely and there are some nice photo gallery plugins available, so maybe setup a basic site with a few simple pages and see how long that takes - then you can estimate how long it’ll take to do the remaining pages.
Steve
Is it really a huge job? Forget the 122 pages, what you have is an existing design that’s being kept, so no design work to do. Just grab a decent pre-existing template that is similar in structure to the existing design and make the necessary adjustments.
Yes, you may have to learn how to set up Wordpress, but that’s a good skill to learn.
I’d say this is quite a small job when you really think about it. As for the 122 pages, surely most of them are just standard text/image pages, so isn’t the client going to add this themselves? All they have to do is copy/paste from the existing site - just set up a default Wordpress install on a testing server and let the client deal with copy/pasting the content while you work on adjusting the design. Then any tricky pages (slideshows etc) are handled by yourself, probably using an existing wordpress plugin.
Don’t get caught up doing database entry donkey work for the client - they can use the copy/paste exercise to help them learn the CMS, so it solves two problems in one.
Thanks for the feedback. Since they already had some high ends design done for them they would need me to recreate the exact design. I had to pass on the job because it was too massive. Believe me, I wanted to get this job. I did offer my services in the skills I already know. But until I get WordPress under my belt and am comfortable with using it there is not use sabotaging myself.
That isn’t really a big job, you just need to get used to jobs with bigger scope.
As a rule, big jobs are estimated just like small jobs - divide into work units and extrapolate the time/effort. But, the larger the job the more you have to adjust for risk.
Would you be coding 122 different page layouts in WP?
122 pages in WP with one page design is the equivalent of coding one page, then you just enter the content in the backend.
As others have said, the 122 pages are not the problem. The problem lies in all the other components, like slideshows (flash or not), menus and users.
122 pages needs more than a simple dropdown menu for navigation to work
what if there are multiple slideshows. Inserting it 122 times or clicking something 122 times won’t cut it.
122 pages need updates, that means you need to have a way to train users and give them confidence and it needs to be reasonably easy (read: not tedious)
To approach such a project you can take the following steps:
HTH, Jochen