Hi everyone!

I would like to put it out there to all of you, how much a good Wordpress site might cost me to build?

I know this depends entirely on what kind of website we are talking about so here is a quick snapshot.

Art Bitch (the social media platform I run dedicated to supporting artists) would like to create a professional website, a hub for all of the other social media, and other, platforms to link back to and tie everything together.

What I want is for this to be for the people, I am very fussy about how I do this for this reason, and want the user experience to be easy, fun, accessible, simple.

There are many other related sites I could point you towards, but basically there will be say 5 main divisions on the website.

News
Events
Projects (to do)
Discussion
Projects (to share = all of us)

I would like to open up Art Bitch to the people, and have a strong relationship between the brand and people contributing externally.

I would allocate advertising spaces on the page.

I would like to connect people.

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social sites would all be connected here also.

Anything else I need to think about? Expand on?

Price for a good WP site that achieves something like this?

Any, all, advice and ideas welcome here.

*)

AB

@arty I do this type of service and have been for the last 6 years. My pricing for this would be $1800.00. 

Whatever, provider you choose you will be required to supply the content. For each category (vertical) you will need some articles/images/video to start with.
The provider should be responsible for a crash course on WP Basics some tips and tricks so that you can work comfortably on your own. 
I provide my clients with a mini-tutorial and followup with a 1 hour call. Then provide ongoing help, usually 3 weeks (just in case you break something)

You will not get this type of service when you buy a premium theme.
  

Could you do the design in-house? Based on the name “Art Bitch” I could see that aspect being a challenge. If you send us a .PSD from there we could connect the nuts and bolts for sub-$500. 

Best, 

@arty I think for what you are wanting a better option would be Expression Engine. This is a commercial CMS with a 1 time license fee but the power of the system and flexibility can’t be matched. I work with Wordpress and Expression Engine and I prefer EE for almost every project I work on. There is a very powerful membership module built right in and additional modules that make it extremely versatile. You get granular control over what each membership level has access to. You can determine as many membership levels as you see fit, setting the permissions of each one. Also with their built in ecommerce module, you can determine if certain membership levels will cost a fee or not.

Expression Engine also has its own coding language that allows a designer to give as much control over every element of the site as the client needs. There is no need for PHP programming to manipulate the system, unlike Wordpress. There is not one way to build a site in Expression Engine.

Access and editing of content for your contributors could all be done on the front end without every needing to go into the Control Panel to edit content. Then based on membership level, they have all the tools they need to contribute to the site.

Also unlike Wordpress, EE doesn’t need themes with pre-defined limitations. The $850 themes mentioned above are probably really nice, but no doubt would not have all the things you need and would have to be adjusted. You are then going to have to pay programming rates for the developer to go in and manipulate PHP code to get it to work how you want. I just got done with a project where I had to adjust PHP code to tweak a theme for my client.

You can find a nice HTML template from a place like http://www.themeforest.net and your designer can take the basic code structure and make it work nicely with the structure of the EE site.

There is a lot more I could say but you can find out additional information by visiting: http://www.expressionengine.com.

I just want you to know there are more options out there besides Wordpress. I’ve found Expression Engine to be the CMS that I recommend to my clients but Wordpress is still a really good CMS, especially for free.

@arty I had a designer build a WordPress site for me three years ago and it cost me $1,800. It was very elaborate and he did a wonderful job. If you find the right designer, I would imagine it would cost between $1,000-$2,500, depending on what you want. WordPress is extremely simple to build out, so I wouldn’t pay more than $2,500. Good luck!

@arty – Cost is an almost irrelevant metric. A better way to think about it is what kind of value will the website return over what period of time.

Try thinking of it this way: “Given my current cash holdings, my current cash flow and my anticipated revenue from this venture, how much can I afford to spend over what period of time to acquire this inbound marketing channel?”

Now you can propose working budgets to designer/developers, and compare what kind of work they propose to do within that budget.

About mentioning budgets, I’ll speak only for myself: all serious clients I’ve *ever* dealt with have been up front about how much money they are willing to spend.  Over the last three years, as I’ve shifted focus from a DARPA-level client to small business clients, my experience is that people unwilling to talk about money right away are more than willing to spend a lot of my time pumping me for free information. It’s not unusual for some of these people to make absurd, even insulting counter-offers. Now I simply ask up front if they have a budget and if they don’t, they are welcome to put a bid on elance, which requires listing a budget up front.

Back to your original question: had I to do it over, I’d do whatever I could to get on Reese Spykerman’s waitlist and pay her whatever she wanted. On the other hand, any of the people here on this forum might well be enough to get you started at a much lower cost. In the long run, the difference between $500, $2000 or even $5000 isn’t very much. It’s certainly a lot less than the difference between a business making a viable monthly return and a business making no monthly return.

I’ll close with an anecdote from (iirc) Robert Collier. In 1923, a “home run” advertising campaign might return the client 100%. That is, an agency billing out $600 and making a $1200 return for the client.  This is worth some serious reflection, on several levels.