Websites and software development. How much do they cost ?

I can do simple HTML myself (http://www.aecmilitant.co.uk/ since you ask).
How much would it cost though, for something a bit more professional looking with more features, like http://www.midlandtrailquests.co.uk
Anyone who does this for a living who could give a rough estimate for the complete site ?

What about software development ?
A bit more difficult to give a price without knowing all the details I suppose ?
Imagine 50 or so people recording a track with one of these.
The software would need to be able to upload all the tracks, including POIs to a database.
It would need to check which POI each rider had visited, then calculate a total score based on the value of each POI on the master map.
It would also need to do all sorts of other useful stuff like display and sort everyone’s results in a table, display everyone’s route on Google Earth, Memory Map or similar and be easy to use by people with only basic computer skills.
How hard would that be ?
Would it be a simple modification of some existing software from somewhere else, or would it be a load of work starting from scratch ?

*sucks in air through teeth* oooh not gonna be cheap.

what about detecting cheating ? GPX files are plain ASCII and easy to edit…

I could do it (barring cheat detection) but I’d charge a fortune 🙂

This is going to be fun.

To do properly, if it was me, I’d be looking at raising serious cash for what you’re talking about.

27,50€ plus Jaffa Cakes and tea.

Not cheap or serious cash in relation to what ?

I bought a Teach Yourself HTML book for £5 and I used to get free club membership for running the website, so it was effectively costing the club £15 a year. I paid for the hosting myself.

I would imagine big corporations have got teams of IT experts on £50kpa doing all their web and software development in house.

Where on that scale is what I described above ?

I used to work for a commercial software house.

12 years ago it was £450 + VAT per day, I’d imagine it would be quite a bit more today. And you don’t get much from 1 day.

BTW us developers at the time were on £20k-£23k depending on experience, how long you’d been with the company, what you started on etc. We certainly didn’t get anywhere near £450/day

I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is going to be more than you’d want to spend.

I think if you sat down with an agency who could handle such a spec and development for you you’d be looking over 50k. I’ve seen that and more getting relatively simple ecommerce sites done and from the sounds of your post you need a lot of bespoke process and db stuff done. You have to be able to justify it of course. Remember a lot of costs won’t just be development, there will be spec’ing, design, branding and so on.

In the end it really it depends how serious you are, is it just a side project, or do you have a model that you think could justify proper investment?

of course, HTML won’t do it, though it could be done in Javascript, but most would choose a server side programming language like PHP, Python, C# etc…

I would guess that to do that adequately. i.e reasonably well thought through, competent visual design and a decent amount of testing would be a minimum of £35,000. Of course if you wanted something done better than average then you’d be looking at upping that figure.

Actually the more I think about it, 35k would be a bargain bordering on mates rates.

Why not give these folks a call?
What is this branding that you speak of damo2575? 😈

or ruby

One possible way of getting it done on the cheap would be to approach your local uni. Find someone looking for inspiration for their final year project and bingo, job’s a goodun.

One possible way of getting it done on the cheap would be to approach your local uni. Find someone looking for inspiration for their final year project and bingo, job’s a goodun.

+1 unless you can justify the £35-£50k+ we seem to think it would cost.

I have a son who’s in his final year of uni doing software. He needs money 🙂

FWIW if it’s more “side project” the tracking/processing part of that would make an excellent MEng/Msci project for a comp. sci. They’d have different priorities to you though (i.e. getting a good grade!) but it could be a potentially cheap/free* way to get a prototype.

I say prototype, as I’ve marked a few students SW engineering assessments, they’re not all great coders, instead perhaps focussing on “making it work”!

What you want nearly exists, in endomondo/sportstracker/mytracks etc etc and the like. As mentioned above though, avoiding tampering of gpx data would be hard though. But you could make it hard enough to be impractical – i.e. taking devices off competitors at the finish line, and checking timestamps match when the device was retrieved etc. But maybe that doesn’t matter? The accuracy/reliability of GPS systems like that isn’t all that – you’d still need manual backup for the inevitable flat batteries/lost signal etc etc?

*they’d just need the hardware to test recording tracks etc, maybe some hosting.

HTML is like knowing how to decorate a house, writing code as you describe is like knowing how to design and build one.

Your best bet is to lob a mate some money or some other benefit and be prepared to wait a while whilst they do it in their spare time 🙂

The software would need to be able to upload all the tracks, including POIs to a database.
It would need to check which POI each rider had visited, then calculate a total score based on the value of each POI on the master map.

Hmm.. two-four weeks of evenings…

It would also need to do all sorts of other useful stuff like display and sort everyone’s results in a table

Not so hard.. couple of nights

display everyone’s route on Google Earth, Memory Map or similar

Umm.. hmm.. not sure how that works. Could probably export a KML file (or whatever it is that GE uses) which you could then load into GE maybe automatically, and that may be able to be loaded into memory map, but you can’t incorporate those programs into a website. Google Maps yes, but you won’t get a proper topographical map then.

You thinking of organising TQs?

I might be persuaded to help if there was something in it for me 🙂

well … its doable, but i think you would need sound knowledge of scripting and database stuff.

i imagine that the gps units will create relatively simple text files which show gps position and time.

it wouldn’t be toooooo hard to run the uploaded file through a script which compares those positions with known ones and if the gps points are within a certain allowable distance of the known ones it can tag time taken etc etc and update a database / points system accordingly ( i.e. mimic how you would manually calculate it )

there may be stuff already out there doing similar stuff, but if it is, I dont imagine that folk would give it over for free.

i suppose you could roughly break it down into:

to create the basics of the site / server
be able to upload files to it
run a script that can churn the file / update results
have the server running databases for members / tracks / results
have the site be able to display data that displays the database information

there is a lot of free stuff outthere that you can get up and running on servers based around databases. etc etc orrp is a free setup and is essentially a set of databases running the forum via mySQL and look how much steve has customised it.

you could steal this code for that 🙂

http://www.bogtrotters.org/route/showrouteframe2.php?route=314

Sounds very like the mygarmin connect site. I reckon get a friend to it dreamweaver who knows about computers.

Why not try a CMS to run the base of your website like Joomla. They have modules that you can load in, which will do all of your forums and other things worth looking into. Also makes it alot easier to update on fly with a nice friendly GUI to do it with.

I’d probably charge about 12 – 16k for it but I’m pretty new to the game so my rates are a lot lower than other peoples will be. Obviously less experience would probably also show in the end product (at least in the back end).

There is nowt technically difficult in the idea as it stands.
I could see bottle neck issues around getting the data uploaded and reported on, but other than that, I don’t see any real problems.

If you could bundle some sort of algorithm analysis around optimal routes etc., it is the sort of thing a GIS post graduate (MSc) student could probably do.

If I had the time…….

If you could bundle some sort of algorithm analysis around optimal routes

I don’t think that’s part of the design brief!

If you could bundle some sort of algorithm analysis around optimal routes etc., it is the sort of thing a GIS post graduate (MSc) student could probably do.

Or an AI MSc grad 😉

Does the whole thing need to be done via the web? It might be simpler to have the analysis done on a laptop, downloading the loggers at the finish, and then just upload the results to a database so that contestants can view the results later.

Why not put up a post here[/url] and see if you get any feedback.

You cold also take a look on Source Fourge for GPS applications that could be adapted for you needs, a quick search found this[/url] which already does some of the things you are after.

a quick search found this

wow, about 1000 files 🙂

FWIW, I don’t think whether it’s on the web or a PC makes much odds…

This isn’t about something I’m thinking of doing, it’s about the MTQ site itself.
It’s all come about because I’m not very happy about having part of one of my posts deleted on the MTQ forum.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I thought I’d get some background information before I assume too much.
The details are far too tedious for anyone else to find interesting, but I’ll go through them as briefly as I can anyway.

The club got a new website.
There are a number of products recommended on the website.
All these products are being sold by the webmaster.
I prefer to see a clear distinction between impartial reviews and adverts, so although I thought this was shabby practice, I didn’t say anything as I realise it costs money to create a web site and giving someone free advertising space as payment seems like a good deal. I just would have preferred it if it was clearly marked as advertising.

The club is now planning on moving away from the old bingo card and ticket punch method of scoring and going for a GPS based system using data loggers.
I’m all in favour of this. It makes it easier for event organisers and it makes it possible to compare competitors routes.
The club has done some trials with data loggers and is recommending the Holux M-1200E.
The club will buy a number of these to hire out at events, club members will be able to buy their own, which will work out cheaper for those who do a lot of events.

Now comes the bit that sounds a bit dodgy to me.
The webmaster is now the UK distributor for Holux.
He sells the Holux M-1200E for £59.95 and has offered a 10% discount to MTQ members.
I’m no computer expert, but I know how do a Google search > Shopping > Sort by Price, so it didn’t take me long to find the same item for £33.15 elsewhere.
I posted this on the forum and it got deleted.

I don’t expect someone to work for nothing.
If the software needs a professional to be paid to create it, then it may well turn out that paying £20 over the odds for every data logger works out as good value.
I’d just rather it was done in a more open manner.

sounds like a definite conflict of interest 🙁
Many people will have their own means of recording GPS already. My phone does it fine.

Tbh before we would quote on that we would expect to complete a full technical scope and charge it to the client.

Rough guestimates are in the same region as some of the above and we would charge around £2k to just scope it.

wow, about 1000 files

Good value, No? 😛 You can play with a demo here

FWIW, I don’t think whether it’s on the web or a PC makes much odds…

I’ve no experience of developing a web application but I guess that a web site that allowed a lot in interaction needs very good security whereas a report only system wouldn’t even need you to log in.

Collecting the loggers at the end of a race an uploading on a laptop would help secure the results as well but makes no difference in terms of actual analysis.

“Conflict of interests”, that’s the phrase I was looking for.
I’m glad I asked here first instead of going off on a rant about running a scam.
£2k to even look at the problem, with anything from £10-50k to do all the work. I really had no idea programming cost anywhere near that much.
With all this Open Source software around, I guessed it was something that people with the knowledge of how to do it could knock up in a couple of evenings.
But then, the Pro versions of Word or Acrobat are £100s, so one off stuff must cost more.

One of the questions I asked was whether we would be able to use a Garmin or other GPS instead of buying another dedicated device.
I was told no, because it wouldn’t be possible make the software compatible with every type of GPS.
Looking at the specifications for the Holux, it exports the file as a .gpx
Garmin give the option of exporting as a .gpx or .tcx file.
Presumably a Waypoint on a Garmin would be read the same as a POI in a Holux ?
If so, that’s a bit more disinformation to push people in to buying something at an inflated price that they don’t even need.

Gpsbabel can convert all formats to pretty much to every other certainly to gpx and it’s free. So users could use that or a form of it used on the site.

I’d be seriously questioning this guys ethics.

Sounds like he’s a bit of an asshat tbh!

I was told no, because it wouldn’t be possible make the software compatible with every type of GPS.

well, perhaps not every, but most can generate GPX files! A website can be put together with free software and tools, but your requirement is too specific for generalised software – and even the putting together requires some knowledge and ability if it’s not to be awful.

I guessed it was something that people with the knowledge of how to do it could knock up in a couple of evenings.

with respect, I think it would take you longer than that to write a formal description of what you want, never mind implement it!

Most of these sort of websites are just tweaked out-the-box opensource CMS sites. I’d hazard a guess STW is just based on WordPress.

You don’t need someone to re-invent the wheel when you can download it for free. Joomla was already mentioned and I reckon with that with your basic html ftp understanding you could make a better site than that trailquests one inside a couple of months if you picked up Joomla for dummys or followed some utube tuts. There is even a joomla gpx plugin available.

Would cost you about 30 squid for some hosting and domain name, ten minutes on an install wizard and some time customising.

Then again if you need it in 3 weeks you gotta pay the going rate. Or outsource to india, freelancer.com?

ten minutes on an install wizard and some time customising.

I feel humbled 🙁

with respect, I think it would take you longer than that to write a formal description of what you want, never mind implement it!

Agreed.

Unfortunately most clients don’t appreciate the time it takes to produce such kinds of work.

It can take days just to test a final site to ensure it works correctly in all common browsers/versions/platforms etc.

And don’tforget the most important element in the design process, being told what you really want.
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Image0002[/url] by simoncarter.es[/url], on Flickr