What are your experiences with building websites

[Tsukihime]

Web presence is important. This usually means you'll want a website of some sort.


For example, I have a website: http://himeworks.com. I use it to host all my scripts and other things I've written in a single location that I can direct others to. I put it together myself on top of Wordpress and pay for hosting. For some custom features such as link redirects, I wrote that myself based for my own needs.


There are roughly two types of people when it comes to websites


1. people that can build their own websites. You don't necessarily need to know your HTML/CSS/JS/PHP: with sites like Facebook or Wix you can quickly put together a page for your own product or service without having to open a text editor. Let's call them the devs.


2. people that either don't have the skills to build the website of their dreams on their own, or do not want to build the websites themselves. Let's call them the business owners, cause it sounds cool.


Now, any sort of website building endeavor requires two things


1. Time, and


2. Money


Devs will likely trade their time to build a website. They might trade their time to build websites for others for money, which is great for them since they're bringing in some cash.


Business owners will likely trade their money for another developer's time.


However, that doesn't mean they don't spend any time on the website itself: they still need to wait until the website's done. If someone wants a website in 3 days, are they likely going to get one for $20? Maybe, maybe not, depends what they want and who they know. And if they want updates to their website? Hmm...


so...


What are your experiences with website building with regards to time and money?


1. Do you identify yourself as someone that can build websites or someone that needs (or prefers) someone else to make one for you?


2. For the devs, what are some easy or hard websites that you've built? How much time did they take? What are your experiences with these websites?


3. For the business owners, what are your experiences with getting someone else to build a website for you? Have you had any good or bad experiences that stand out?


My responses


1. I'd say I'm a dev, seeing how I put my website together myself.


2. I've never built websites for others, but putting together my site was pretty quick: just installed wordpress and it was ready to go. However my needs were pretty simple: I just needed a way to deliver content in a somewhat easy way.


3. I haven't asked anyone to build any websites for myself yet.

 

[Euphoria]

I used wordpress.com (not .org), so I wouldn't necessarily call myself a dev. I did use a little CSS and I do remember a bit of HTML from high school though.

I only have made the website in my signature, so I can't really answer #2 well.

Can't answer #3 either.

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Although I didn't fully make my own website, it did take quite awhile to get things how I wanted, but overall I enjoyed doing it, and am going to edit some stuff on it right now! I usually enjoy editing and maintaining it.

 

[seita]

I'd be considered a dev then. I got into it when I was 11 when Lego.com was letting kids make websites online. It was a simple form you filled out and it made you your own page, it was awesome. After that I built my own scooby doo website on geocities, or was it homestead... i dunno, but that was awesome too, there were scooby snacks tiled for the background. Anyway this was when all the websites out there looked like crap, and mine were awesome looking pieces of crap.

From then to high school I was building sites here and there. I had a gundam website called "The Shinigami Shrine" which used angelfire. It had one of the first website building tools that used floating divs. It was messy but it worked. Eventually I learned to use tables for website formatting and made it much 'better'.

I was involved in a bunch of online gundam communities, many of which were structured as games. You'd sign up for a gundam and a character, and you'd send in requests to the GMs on what you'd like to do based on the rules. Train for a day to raise Agi, Str or something, go to this location and buy stuff, make some money, or attack a fellow player. If they died, they'd be on a timer to respawn. The battles were all written like short stories. The internet couldn't get any better than this. I built one of their newer versions of their website, then I built my own and tried to make a community but I couldn't finish the rules and systems. It would have been called "White Reflections"

I also made and operated a Love Hina website when it was fresh in the US. It was called "Bakatoudaisei" at bakatoudaisei.com which means "stupid tokyo university student". It's down now, I unfortunately let the domain expire. It was the most work I had done on a website since I started. It used mouse hover with images to show descriptions of links before you clicked on them, iframes, generic css, oekaki boards, guestbooks and all that jazz.

Anyway, I always wanted to but never learned PHP. It would have really let me use my web design skills to the max.

I've built a few renditions of a startup loan company's website for about $2,000, a dental website for about $1,000, a police departments Police officers association website for about $750, and a bunch more I just don't really remember. They were all information dumps except for the police officer one, which was built using Mambo or Joomla, forgot which. I made the template however.

I also made Citadelcreations.com, which was to be a gaming news site until I threw in the towel, my YANTH website and my tomorning productions website, which was really a class project.

I know there's a bunch of other websites I've worked on, but I can't think of them right now.

EDIT: Wow I found some links, and these are super duper old. I don't have dev access to them anymore but thank god they're still online. Such a blast from the past!

New ads really messed up the layouts.

The Shinigami Shrine:  http://www.angelfire.com/anime3/tss0/

http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/gundampilot_f01/char_shrines_duo_shrine.html

 

[Ultim]

I already finished the Codecademy HTML & CSS course,and I only need 2 lessons to complete jQuery.I can call myself a dev.I made a site with HTML & CSS for testing myself,and now,I learn jQuery to make an fully interactive website.

@seita: I'm a teen and I can code my website from scratch (Not being rude of offensive)

 

[seita]

@Ultim that's good for you! Back when I was a teen, there was no jQuery, no PHP. HTML was literally HTML1 so any hand coding was limited to the very basic tags. HTML, Head, Body, P, Table, the text modifications and that was pretty much it. We all had 800px monitors or smaller, and images took foreverrrr to load.

I also hand code everything I do, though I take shortcuts nowadays with dreamweaver for the basic layout, before I polish it up by hand.

edit: damn I sound old. I'm just 27

 

[Setheim]

Do you identify yourself as someone that can build websites or someone that needs (or prefers) someone else to make one for you?

I used to develop websites for a living some 7 years ago or so. Mostly CSS static sites which only function were to look good and deliver the info as best as it could.

For the devs, what are some easy or hard websites that you've built? How much time did they take? What are your experiences with these websites?

Each site was... difficult in some way or another. Part of what I did as a designer / developer was to create things that would lead people to whatever you were selling / announcing, so it was tricky. A well done site could take up to two months (which was the main reason I just didn't want to keep at it, projects that last that long wear thin for me quickly). However I never took much time in designing my own websites and since then I rather use platforms like squarespace to do the hard work for me, of course, I no longer design websites so it doesn't matter for me that much anymore. (ie: THis is my curent site: www.engarcia.squarespace.com)

I did grab a final jig some three years ago or so, old clients of mine wanted a redesign and convinced me to jump in for it. It took a bit more than a month, I was doing mostly design (not coding) which turned it to be something very hard to do, because the coder and I had a hard time understanding each other (specially since we were on different countries) which made the whole thing to take a lot longer than it should have, the final website didn't come out as great as I planned it but the client was happy so we called it even (www.lovelylittlethings.nl).

I'd say...  

If you are hiring someone, take your time to choose the right developer / designer for you. Don't grab the first one that comes your way and try to communicate a little, for understanding each other is a key part of the whole process. 

To help with this, be open and direct on what you want your website to do and how much you are willing to pay for it. 

Let it have creative freedom, if it's a professional this only means he will do his best to meet your needs. If you try to interfere too much it will only hurt the final product.

But if you feel the website is not meeting your needs say it so, but also say "why" and be sure such "why" is well fundamented. 

And that's it.

Cheers.

 

[Tsukihime]

@Euphoria


My first blog was on wordpress.com. It was great: the blog was given to me, I just had to set up some menus, figure out what categories I needed, maybe add a couple widgets here and there, and the rest was content. But then I wanted a plugin to make the site more user-friendly (eg: post previews, markdown to make it easier to write code snippets, etc.) and then wordpress.com suddenly wasn't as flexible anymore.


@Ultim


Which is good. Some people brag about how much time they spend playing games as a teen or how much money they spent on Magic the Gathering.


@Seita


It sounds like you've had a number of unique experiences throughout your web career. I think it's great that you brought up sites like angelfire and geocities, as these were basically what most people probably started out with: free hosts that provide just enough control to build something that you can use to achieve your purposes.


But ya, now with all the new tech around, the "first experience" for a new web dev/designer is likely going to be much different and possibly a lot easier. Naturally, they'd still need to put effort into it.


I'm sure a lot of people aren't too comfortable with posting up numbers (for whatever reasons including confidentiality, etc), but it is important that the numbers are out there. The amount of time that you invested in each project would be useful for perspective, since $2000 for 24 hours of work is definitely a lot different from $2000 for 2 weeks of work or 2 months of work.


While I've never done a website, I've been offered $10/$20 to build custom scripts for Ace, which usually basically amount to $1 an hour. Maybe more if I already had it written but just need to tweak a little, but that's typically not the case.


For professional work, people should expect to get paid what they are worth. If someone wants a beautiful website with a full login system and user submissions and photo galleries...and are only willing to pay $100 for it, is that really worth it?


As Setheim mentions, a well-done site could take weeks or months. Since this was done for a living, presumably a lot of time (say, 8-12+ hours a day) was put into it. Granted, 7 years ago we didn't have all the frameworks and tools and fluffy clouds, so it might have been somewhat slower since you had to understand basically everything in order to get it all together.


What I find especially difficult, for both sides, is when it comes time for the dreaded feature add-ons and on-going support, because for some reason I am expected to maintain everything for you. You have to make it clear that this is not the case if you don't plan to provide it.


Now someone wants a new thing for the website (or in my case, say a script). If you're unlucky, some people try their best to get you to work for free. Bugs? Work for free. Or they'll never talk to you again and tell everyone that you suck. Blackmail! Amazing. I'm sure some freelancers have experienced the whole "hey I didn't mention this before but I wanted _____, so I'm not paying you until you do it" deal.

 

[EternalShadow]

I can build one from scratch, and by using pregenerating software, like Weebly, etc. Depends if I need something up quickly.


I think the easiest sites to make are those that are simply there to 'host content', such as information. The hardest are certainly those that need to be updated frequently, such as blogs.

 

[Indinera]

What are your experiences with website building with regards to time and money?

Very good. i built my website myself from scratch (notepad lol). I've been building websites since 1996, I only know HTML but it's enough to build a website, and of my websites were pretty successful in the past (heck my current one is pretty successful lol). For that reason it was free and didn't take too much time either.

1. Do you identify yourself as someone that can build websites or someone that needs (or prefers) someone else to make one for you?

I prefer to make it myself by a landslide. Full control on everything, can update whenever I want.

2. For the devs, what are some easy or hard websites that you've built? How much time did they take? What are your experiences with these websites?

My website is not very advanced (yet it works) so it was rather easy. Not a long time to make it. Good experience if I judge by how many sales it made, including affiliated sales.

3. For the business owners, what are your experiences with getting someone else to build a website for you? Have you had any good or bad experiences that stand out?

I never asked anyone to make my website. I prefer less sophisticated but full control over it.

 

[Euphoria]

@Euphoria

My first blog was on wordpress.com. It was great: the blog was given to me, I just had to set up some menus, figure out what categories I needed, maybe add a couple widgets here and there, and the rest was content. But then I wanted a plugin to make the site more user-friendly (eg: post previews, markdown to make it easier to write code snippets, etc.) and then wordpress.com suddenly wasn't as flexible anymore.

Actually after visiting your site, some time ago, I had planned to switch to wordpress.org and learn to do things that way, I just haven't had the time or patience to do it yet. But it was your site that inspired that thought!

 

[seita]

I'm sure a lot of people aren't too comfortable with posting up numbers (for whatever reasons including confidentiality, etc), but it is important that the numbers are out there. The amount of time that you invested in each project would be useful for perspective, since $2000 for 24 hours of work is definitely a lot different from $2000 for 2 weeks of work or 2 months of work.

For professional work, people should expect to get paid what they are worth. If someone wants a beautiful website with a full login system and user submissions and photo galleries...and are only willing to pay $100 for it, is that really worth it?

What I find especially difficult, for both sides, is when it comes time for the dreaded feature add-ons and on-going support, because for some reason I am expected to maintain everything for you. You have to make it clear that this is not the case if you don't plan to provide it.

Now someone wants a new thing for the website (or in my case, say a script). If you're unlucky, some people try their best to get you to work for free. Bugs? Work for free. Or they'll never talk to you again and tell everyone that you suck. Blackmail! Amazing. I'm sure some freelancers have experienced the whole "hey I didn't mention this before but I wanted _____, so I'm not paying you until you do it" deal.

It's been such a long time since I developed websites that it's difficult to put a number on how long it would take. I do remember managing my time and researching the rates web developers asked for at the time. I recall something around $25/hr for new web devs, and $75/hr for more experienced devs. Naturally I went with the lower price point.

Unfortunately I'm 100% sure I didn't adhere to my own rules and just took as much time as necessary to make the websites what they were. Essentially they underpaid but I was happy with my work. It was a side gig while I was still in high school.

For the loan company, I did a redesign and edits free of charge. He was my now-deceased brother-in-law's co-worker, and I knew their situations were getting worse by they day so I felt for them. I would say I did  an extra $2k worth of work for free in the years after the initial payment to me was made.

For the dental website, it was one and done aside from a change in information here and there, so no upkeep was necessary. By the time I did the police officers association website, I made it clear in the terms that I would provide support and basic maintenance by the hour, for so many hours within the next three years (how long the site will be up until it needs to be renewed). Anything past that they would be charged. They seem to have forgotten about the website though, so that's about it.

Essentially, other than the loan company (which really was just one person and a few of his co-workers) , I was lucky enough to have clients who didn't want to take advantage of me.

 

[jessica121]

My experience with websites is really great, I use http://www.onlinephotoshopfree.net when adding elements to my websites.