I know that STW has a good core of skilled IT bods, so here’s a question:

I want to build a website which has similar funtionality to both a job-search site & a dating website. I don’t have the money to pay someone to do it for me.

I’m not stupid, and know the terminology of IT, but have avoided coding myself, so far. It’s like a eunuch’s relationship with pornography.

How long would it take me to learn the skills and then to DIY ? Any estimates?

Easiest way might be to learn a cms like Drupal and then see if there are any add on modules like this one that you could use http://drupal.org/project/jobsearch. Coding it from scratch sounds like way too much pain

If you haven’t used something like Drupal before then the money spent on buying a book won’t be wasted

how long is a piece of strng?
how complicated is the site? if you want interaction with the user, you’re almost certainly going to have to learn some relatively complex programming and how long that’ll take will depend on your compatibility with that way of thinking

you also have to consider the security implications of having a database with what, one assumes, will be some fairly personal data bout the site users.

First thing, don’t use php – it’s terrible.
Second, don’t forget that there’s a lot more to programming than code.

BBSB, yes, there must be some interaction with users. Search & the like.
Assume I’m going to be competent, are we talking about 3 months? 6 months? a year? I know it’s not going to be instant, but finger-in-the-air time would be helpful.

Is this a revival of the ‘casting couch’?

The sort of website you describe would typically have large teams of developers working on them all the time, so for one person with no experience to do this from scratch is an incredibly big ask

I want to build a website which has similar funtionality to both a job-search site & a dating website

Data privacy, beginner programmer. What could possibly go wrong…

I would strongly advise against DIY unless you have lots of time to get it done properly.

If you’re going to ignore that then try and find someone with the necessary skills who can provide you some direction even if they don’t do the work themselves (though funnily enough few will be keen to do that for you..)

FuzzyWuzzy – Member
Is this a revival of the ‘casting couch’?

🙂

Well, it’s certainly a challenging market. Or rather two challenging markets. Given the massive saturation of online dating and job websites, I’d say that was a pretty pointless task, unless you’ve managed to find some amazing, undiscovered niche out there.

Assume I’m going to be competent, are we talking about 3 months? 6 months? a year? I know it’s not going to be instant, but finger-in-the-air time would be helpful.

If I was going to ask someone to design, build and implement the sort of site you’ve described for commercial use I’d expect a) not easily to find one individual with the skills and flair to do all of the work, b) that it probably takes 2 years to get up to speed as a commercial developer and that c) it’s several man-years effort to do the job properly.

You might be better to try and find someone who has the skills you need and if this is a serious commercial prospect then offer them equity to get involved.

You might be better to try and find someone who has the skills you need and if this is a serious commercial prospect then offer them equity to get involved.

Hey, I have this great idea and for 20% equity you can hear my idea and then do all the work!

Never heard that one before. 🙄

It would be quicker for you to earn the money to pay someone to do the work for you.

Torminalis: Quite right, that’s why I reckon I have to do it myself or pay someone. Yes, I think I have spotted a niche that would make money, which is why I haven’t been too specific about it exceot for suggesting a couple of similar types of database-backed applications / websites.

ASM would be the best language for the job.

Hey, I have this great idea and for 20% equity you can hear my idea and then do all the work!

Never heard that one before

I didn;t say 20% did I?

Surely this is how businesses start – people get together contribute their skills and hope somethign comes out of it?

If the OP has a great idea but can’t implement it then why not work with someone who has some practical skills but no great idea? If it works out they both win.

I assume the OP woudl contribute more than a sketched design on the back of an envelope to the business.

Binners will be along in a minute with the pie chart link I’m sure. 🙂

To be honest, the coding is secondary, and a minor part of the project. Almost all of the work is going to be in the business specification and design.

I have done this sort of thing for a living.

It’s a massive job, it would take a long long time to do on your own even if you were an expert.

Definitely not DIYable.

I didn;t say 20% did I?

Surely this is how businesses start – people get together contribute their skills and hope somethign comes out of it?

If the OP has a great idea but can’t implement it then why not work with someone who has some practical skills but no great idea? If it works out they both win.

I assume the OP would contribute more than a sketched design on the back of an envelope to the business.

When you launch a biggish site, you need a load of cash. The heart of an idea is the simple bit, you can describe the core idea behind most sites in a paragraph. Fleshing out every detail of a large system with accounts, forums, profiles and the who knows what else is the hard bit. The programmer is far more experienced at making decisions on the details of a site and they are what take the time.

I reckon 5 years absolute minimum programming experience before you could learn everything you needed to know to successfully deliver a project like this so not DIY-able at all.

Unless you can pay your programmer to do it, no chance. Reckon on GBP300+ per day per decent contractor, probably take at least 6 months to build.

Good luck.

There’s an open source everything

Can’t me any harder then phpbb or OsCommerce to install, and if you cant do those or don’t know what they are you should be considering something else.

I’m going to have to think hard, aren’t I ?
The few people I’ve discussed the idea with all think it’s a goer, and there is little competition at present. There’s a definite path to monetization, but….
6 months at £300ish /day = £30k which I haven’t got.
Additional project costs would eat up another £10k.

So I’m left with no alternative to DIY. Looks like a 2-year project from what is said above. Time to start learning!

Does anyone have any more input about timescales and/or environments?

Go to a tech conference where you can get a feel for what is involved in developing sites like you describe. Drupal was mentioned earlier and Frontendunited is coming up soon – http://frontendunited.org

I see no reason why, if you *really* committed to it, you couldn’t learn the necessary skills in a year to get most of the way to your goal.

Rachel

As someone who’s worked in software development / solutions architecture my advice would be that the coding is the easy bit. The hard bit is understanding exactly how the end-user is going to use it.

If you don’t get that right then any money you put in is going to be wasted.

The effort that goes into refining the user experience is what makes a site like that work. So if you don’t get it right first time then someone comes along, steals your ideas and does it better.

If you’re also going to teach yourself how to code / design it then I wish you luck. But put the effort in around the user interaction. Everything else can be copied. And if its an idea consider copyrighting it (or proving its yours first somehow) – cos that way you might make money on it if someone else takes it.

It’s not easy to make money from a site either. People don’t want to pay for something that they can get for free somewhere else.

I’d say 5 to 10 years experience (in C#, ASP.Net, SQL Server, SQL, UX, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, AJAX) if you want to do it yourself or £300 – £400 per day (or more, looking at the skills list I just typed!) for a contractor to take it on, depending on how quickly you need it and how well you want it done. Oh, and there’s Data Protection and all that to think about…

Unless you have it REALLY tightly specced, right down to what happens on every last login failure and forgotten password, forget it or pay up and look big. I’m working on a contract at the moment with virtually no spec and I’m either making it up as I go along or checking with the PM all the time, both of which are annoying.

Hope this puts you off or makes you learn or pay!

It may be more effective spending your time learning how to get investors to give you money…

Does anyone have any more input about timescales and/or environments?

Typed three answers, deleted all of them.

Look at Design Patterns, get some mentors. Write a shit load of shit code. Learn about logging and SOA and read Splosky, Hunt, Skeet et al. Anticipate what your clients want before they even know it and sell their own ideas back to them. Occupy the middle zone, where the only acceptable answer is the right one. Compromise is a a decision, you are the creator. You feel the answers before the client even ask the question. Be a craftsman. Wine?

I didn’t reply to this earlier as I wanted to ponder it for a bit.

The skills you’re talking about will take a little while to grasp the basics of, but a lifetime to master; your question is basically “how quickly can I learn a new career or two?” Because make no mistake, that’s what you’re describing. And TBH, if you do get your skills up to the level your project requires, it’s probably going to be more lucrative to become a developer than to complete the project.

You could probably learn to knock up a site in a relatively short space of time, but it would almost certainly be shit. Now, if you want a shit site (and you might – proof of concept maybe?) then go for it. If you’re looking for a robust, professional solution which is ready for public release but you aren’t prepared to embark on your new career then forget it.

I’d like a new house but can’t afford one. Maybe I should DIY it? How hard can it be, few bricks and a bit of paint, yeah?

You could probably learn to knock up a site in a relatively short space of time, but it would almost certainly be shit.

Genuine late night drunken lolz. 😆

(-: I speak from first-hand experience.

The more I learn the harder everything seems. I do wonder sometimes if could throw off the shackles of defensive programming, logging, resilience and stuff but at the end of the day you have to do it properly. I love my job. [insert smiley face]

The more I learn the harder everything seems.

Nail. Head.

Go for it I say, do it yourself.

It does not have to be perfect it needs to be good enough to attract a round of funding. If you really have a decent idea you need to be able to demonstrate it then sell the idea to people willing to invest venture capital.

Developing quality, high availability software is expensive but you can wing it a bit to start.

Lets face it we would not have facebook (not sure if thats a good or a bad thing) if they listened to all the nay sayers on here !!!

Bazzer

Facebook was coded by a bunch of CS students – they didn’t need to learn how to write software in the first place…

and they understood how to design something that was scaleable.

You don’t want to design and build a platform that works great when you and a couple of mates are usign it but needs a rewrite to allow more than 10 users on at the same time.

(see recent Superstar basket/session issues as an example)

Facebook was coded by a bunch of CS students

Not in its current form it wasn’t.

It does not have to be perfect it needs to be good enough to attract a round of funding.

Well.. if you are going to attract funding I doubt a dodgy site is going to help. You’re not aiming to demonstrate your technical capability to investors, because you have none and you won’t be able to bullshit them. You are aiming to demonstrate your idea and business sense in this case. Seems to me knowing what you’re good at, and knowing when you need external help will be a key skill to demonstrate. You’d be better off focusing on quality mock-ups (maybe get design help for those?) and a good business case.

6 months at £300ish /day = £30k which I haven’t got.
Additional project costs would eat up another £10k.

The biggest problem you’ll face is even if you created this ‘service’ how are you actually going to then make money – which requires advertising (either bricks+morter type or viral). And this will cost far more.

Are you 99% sure that what you’ve in mind doesn’t atcually exist already?

And having run web development departments and been in the industry since before the dot.com, I’ve seen vast amounts of cash/time spent for little/no return. Mostly by folk who didn’t actually understand the basic industry they were operating, but could persuade Directors that these were must haves’ – so they usually did alright.

The only time I’ve seen ‘little’ guys make good money was by creating something that either a FTSE/Global wanted, or that they saw that it could impact their market. And then they are bought.

Many of these comments are extremely useful. Perhaps I ought to get a proper job instead. 🙂
There are some near-competitors in the market, but they are not very well done or appealing, and their models for monetization are poor. I think I can see a way to make some money, way down the line.
I’ll be either rich or skint by 2016.
Specification & design comes first, I reckon.

I’d do a business plan first 😉

This is why technical people (myself included) never do well in business. All we see the reasons why we can’t do something properly and give up.

I have worked for several start ups where I have thought “This is crap what we are doing. We don’t have the money to do it properly” They used the cobbled together crap as a demonstrator attracted funds and now have a yearly development budget of well over a million pounds.

People who develop massive scale-able solutions for companies think that the only solution is a massive scale-able solution and sometimes this is not what is needed in the embryonic stages of a company.

if the idea is a genuine go-er, you need

1) business plan
2) a mate who can cobble a web site together for demonstrating
3) some tech savvy investors who have seen 1 & 2 and like where it is going

#1 more important than #2

best of luck

have worked for several start ups where I have thought “This is crap what we are doing. We don’t have the money to do it properly” They used the cobbled together crap as a demonstrator attracted funds and now have a yearly development budget of well over a million pounds

conversely, I have worked for several start ups in similar situations, who never got past the “cobbled together crap” stage. They had some initial funding but it was blown when the company fell into a few easily avoided traps.

lesson: start a company, do it with investor’s money, that way if it all goes tits up you can start afresh with another idea