timjpriebe — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:14:10 +0000

I guess I should have qualified my original statement... Lately, we've been doing sites that are not programming intensive. That, and the 2 weeks is filling in the content, where we actually did the design during the six weeks.

Thanks for all the input so far, guys. It's interesting to see how different people look at this differently.

aboyd — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:08:41 +0000

bja888 wrote: Personally, me working alone on the higest quality site takes 1 month to 2 weekd design. Then 2 or 3 Months to work on the rest. But then again I did my blog site in a week. Actually more like 5 days.

Yes. I agree. I built a quick blog site for my wife in 1 day. But there were huge, important caveats: I didn't care (much) about design, there were no graphics, there weren't even a lot of features. All she could do was post a message, revise it, delete it, and reorder their placement.

But I am working on a site now that involves some graphic design, and a lot of defensive programming. I have to think hard about how people will break things, and try to steer them into doing it right. Lot of usability work in that, too. And the database design alone, with about 20 tables all heavily relational, took quite a bit of work to get right. I have put in about 2 months of work on the site, from early sketches to database design, from graphic design to revised comps, and from beta builds to feedback from people testing. It will be another month before it is launched and finalized.

If I had a team, it would cut the time in half, maybe 5 or 6 weeks total. Doing it on my own, a 2-week period to build & deploy sounds inconceivable.

Megan — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:20:55 +0000

Yeah, my site didn't take that long to do either but then, it really helps if you know exactly what you want and how to do it. I can't imagine getting an entire site done for a client in two weeks, start to finish. I could have a prototype done in that amount of time maybe, but again, that depends on the scope of the project.

bja888 — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:39:07 +0000

Personally, me working alone on the higest quality site takes 1 month to 2 weekd design. Then 2 or 3 Months to work on the rest. But then again I did my blog site in a week. Actually more like 5 days.

Busy — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:05:31 +0000

You also have to allow for the "not sure about that", "can we try this", "my aunt murtle has this ..."
I've been waiting for about a year for a friend to give me the content so I can finish his site, he doesn't seem to be in a hurry. At one stage he even said I could write something up about his work - yeah and I do brain surgery in the weekends.

Clients who have never used a webdeveloper before usually take forever, but you get the exceptions, where as others give it to you all in one bundle with a realistic outcome you can get down to straight away. The 'fine tuning' seems to be the most time consuming

openmind — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:59:17 +0000

Its almost impossible to place a time scale as every project is different I find.

I normally will strat work on the layout from a brief from the client and work on that whilst he is getting his content together. In addition I can build the admin area whilst he's doing that...

That way the client tasks and mine run alongside each other so I'm not sat around waiting for content...