Posted: 3/3/2011 1:02:01 PM EDT
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I need to design a website for my business. I'm filmmaker in my spare time and I'm thinking of self distributing my film instead of doing all this festival BS. Anyways, I need a website that would accept Visa, look professional and that could accept orders for mail order DVD's or streaming video. (and no it's not porn.)
How much would I be looking at spending with a web designer for a site that hosts a trailer, merchant account, and pay and stream ability? Anything I could get screwed over on? Here's an example of a film that was highly successful at taking this route. http://www.notebynotethemovie.com/ It's a documentary about Steinway pianos being made and believe it or not, it was very successful. |
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There's a huge variance in website pricing. It's hard to even ballpark it without going directly to some companies and get a few quotes for what you want.
I would guess yours would start around $2,500 and go up depending on how custom you want it to look. But to get a basic template-based website with some type of shopping cart system, and not a lot of custom development, $2,500 is probably a decent ballpark. Of course, if you want it to look less like a cookie-cutter site, you're looking at spending more, and $10k for a fairly simple website is not uncommon. ETA: The website you posted is not an e-commerce site. They simply link to another website that sells their item. You could go a similar route and save some money if you're only selling 1-2 products. You don't need a complete shopping cart software on your site. |
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Quoted:
There's a huge variance in website pricing. It's hard to even ballpark it without going directly to some companies and get a few quotes for what you want. I would guess yours would start around $2,500 and go up depending on how custom you want it to look. But to get a basic template-based website with some type of shopping cart system, and not a lot of custom development, $2,500 is probably a decent ballpark. Of course, if you want it to look less like a cookie-cutter site, you're looking at spending more, and $10k for a fairly simple website is not uncommon. ETA: The website you posted is not an e-commerce site. They simply link to another website that sells their item. You could go a similar route and save some money if you're only selling 1-2 products. You don't need a complete shopping cart software on your site. Actually I forgot about that on that site, they do link to some third party deal. Yup it would be two items, either DVD or stream. |
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There are tons of very cheap hosting companies that offer online web building tools, shopping cart option, etc.
Many of them are actually very decent and creating a contemporary functional website with them is easy. Most of them charge only around 10 dollars per month. Paying some firm $ 2500+ to do it for you is only reasonable when you need a very sophisticated site with hundreds of products to sell. I have used these with good results: http://www.weebly.com http://www.wix.com |
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Quoted: I need to design a website for my business. I'm filmmaker in my spare time and I'm thinking of self distributing my film instead of doing all this festival BS. Anyways, I need a website that would accept Visa, look professional and that could accept orders for mail order DVD's or streaming video. (and no it's not porn.) How much would I be looking at spending with a web designer for a site that hosts a trailer, merchant account, and pay and stream ability? Anything I could get screwed over on? Here's an example of a film that was highly successful at taking this route. http://www.notebynotethemovie.com/ It's a documentary about Steinway pianos being made and believe it or not, it was very successful. Have you considered simply contacting these folks and telling them you love their website and would like to do something similar? They may be willing to tell you who did their site. |
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Paying some firm $ 2500+ to do it for you is only reasonable when you need a very sophisticated site with hundreds of products to sell. Not really. You get what you pay for with website development. $2,500 is on the low end of the spectrum. You're not going to get any e-commerce site very sophisticated for that. A $2500 budget is very reasonable for a project such as the OP's. A company needing a "sophisticated site with hundreds of products to sell" is going to need to budget upwards of $10k to build a decent website. My company is redoing our website (with about 15k products and 25k customers) and the cost will be around $55,000. Even then, it's a pretty simple template based site with a few custom development mods and some layout changes. To do a complete custom e-commerce site can easily run $200,000 and up. |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
Paying some firm $ 2500+ to do it for you is only reasonable when you need a very sophisticated site with hundreds of products to sell. Not really. You get what you pay for with website development. $2,500 is on the low end of the spectrum. You're not going to get any e-commerce site very sophisticated for that. A $2500 budget is very reasonable for a project such as the OP's. A company needing a "sophisticated site with hundreds of products to sell" is going to need to budget upwards of $10k to build a decent website. My company is redoing our website (with about 15k products and 25k customers) and the cost will be around $55,000. Even then, it's a pretty simple template based site with a few custom development mods and some layout changes. To do a complete custom e-commerce site can easily run $200,000 and up. What I was saying was that in OP`s case, similar results can be achieved without spending at least $2500. Selling one or two DVDs and showing a film trailer needs a simplistic and eye catching website focusing on that one film. There are really no gadgets and major programming work needed in that. Also you need to think through how you want your site to be configured, managed, edited etc. Big companies with their own full time IT guys can rely on them writing everything into HTML and upgrading as necessary. When you`re a small player, each move your IT service provider makes is going to cost you money and time. A lot of that can be done by yourself, many sites work user-friendly CMS programs that do not aquire professional know-how to operate. Online based "drag and drop" editing is even easier. |