Website development cost in the DR

I don't know how much it costs to make a site in the DR, but for webhosting I use HostNine - Web Hosting - Reseller Hosting - Dedicated Servers - 877-251-HOST

Basic dreamweaver html site of a few pages with absolutely nothing fancy, not even protected email forms, and artwork supplied by the owner, you will get in the region of $150. If your developer is a good one, you?ll get a basic css.

Strange, I?ve recently moved to HostNine but use another host as well that is Joomla optimized.

Seems to me that web developement is something that can be done virtually form anywhere. Market prices should determine the cost regardless of the developers physical location.

Sure a Dominican web developer who cant speak english and doesnt have access to clientelle outside his immediate social circle would possibly get less money than someone hawking their services on the open international market, but how much experience can someone like that actually have, given the limited scope of the market they work in?

I used a young dominican from san cristobal (near santo domingo) to design my web page. he is very honest person, so we could work together and got exactly what I wanted. very different that if i would hire a company to do this. he is good in web design, but not very creative. it was better for me, because i am an architect, so I decided what to do. he had not problem with this. i do a lot of changes every day, and he still has not problem.
pm if you need more info.
check my page | HAUSEN LANDSCAPE | Planning, Design, Contruction, Maintenance

slas7713 said:

I'm curious about prices being charged by those of you out there doing web development in the DR. Or, I should say those of you out there with the education, training and credentials to do a site correctly using, say Dreamweaver. Say your going to design a basic site of five or six pages from the ground up with no flash or backend database. Ballpark figures are OK.

Also, who are you currently using to host your sites?

I was asked this question by a good friend and unfortunately I've been out of touch in this arena.

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide,

Steve

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Developing a basic website, assuming branding, content and graphics elements are provided separately, should be pretty inexpensive. Figure about $25 USD per page or so for transitional HTML. Mostly it's a simple assembly process.

But if you want to have branding, graphics and SEO quality content then you can pay a whole heck of a lot more. For a hotel I think you should measure this in the thousands of dollars for it to be effective.

prices here in santo domingo start around 12,000 pesos.

Perhaps this should be rephrased

I wouldn't call Dreamweaver a professional website development tool. It is a nice piece of software and might be useful to some professionals in some areas. It is mainly for doing static sites which almost always fall under the radar of professional web developers and really aren't that appropriate for very many sites today.

Even small sites today are dynamic database driven sites.

To be honest, I haven't seen any Dominican developed web sites that come anywhere close to what a decent web site should be.

Even Codetel (the last time I checked) and supercarros are poor pieces of work.

I would agree that in general, it doesn't matter much where a web developer is located, but I wouldn't apply that to the Dominican market. This country needs a web development company that can walk in and sit down with a client and talk them through the process face to face and that has the capabilities to do everything from hotel sites to corporate sites and provide adequate support for them.

Actually, I am seriously considering offering classes (in English) on proper web development starting in January.

lhtown said:

I would agree that in general, it doesn't matter much where a web developer is located, but I wouldn't apply that to the Dominican market. This country needs a web development company that can walk in and sit down with a client and talk them through the process face to face and that has the capabilities to do everything from hotel sites to corporate sites and provide adequate support for them.

Actually, I am seriously considering offering classes (in English) on proper web development starting in January.

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I agree with you 100%!

Send me a PM, lets have a chat

I can't speak for what others charge but I have a boutique-sized firm that does web design/development along with other design. For a static site with no flash or inherit technology of about 5-6 pages in one language would run about US $1200 and I know that it is within range of professional pricing. I personally have over 10 years experience in web design for example.

What you have to evaluate is if you are getting a site that is designed, marketed and built to reach your target audience versus just a bunch of code pulled together. We spend alot of time on concepting the site, presenting various options, etc. so the client ends up with a site he/she is totally satisfied with.

As for hosting, we use a couple of companies in the US -- websitesource.com and webmasters.com. Currently there are no hosting companies in this country my company would recommend -- actually we have had many problems with a few of them.

I wouldn't call Dreamweaver a professional website development tool. It is a nice piece of software and might be useful to some professionals in some areas. It is mainly for doing static sites which almost always fall under the radar of professional web developers and really aren't that appropriate for very many sites today.

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As for the point above I have to strongly disagree. Dreamweaver is an excellent platform for both managing the site development and creating the initial site and it does allow for integrating dynamic content. Obviously, depending on the site specfications, other development platforms might be appropriate but I think it is a bit extreme to say that Dreamweaver is not a professional tool.

slas7713 said:

I'm curious what web development software you use that you consider a "Professional web development tool"?

If you developing in PHP and MySQL I understand the statement above and you would use an appropriate IDE but what if you're developing in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for example?

I've also noticed that these days many businesses looking for new websites are not so interested in fancy flash and slow loading sites. Is this also what you're seeing?

Steve

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I didn't mean to start a holy war. Also, I am not a true expert or even a professional, but I do have a fairly well rounded understanding of web development principles for a non-expert.

There are probably hundreds of professional development solutions of all shapes, colors and sizes. The good news is that some of them are really starting to grow up and mature. Personally, my general favorite is Drupal. It meets my needs for everything I am doing currently.

As far as flash goes, I really don't like it. A little might be acceptable and there are a few outside use cases where it does a reasonably good job (like online videos), but it is almost always the wrong way to do things when you are talking about site layout. In my opinion, it should go the way of table layouts. It can be pretty, but it doesn't have much else going for it. If you don't believe me, try navigating a typical flash site with a text to speech browser as a blind person or even just try viewing the site with flash disabled, or with a tiny screen and so forth and so on.

I don't think too many people are developing in php and mysql from scratch any more. (I am not talking about the cut and paste crowd here) It isn't a bad way of doing things, but it is usually far more productive to do coding inside of a more advanced framework like Drupal, ruby on rails, django, joomla or one of the hundreds of others that are out there.

As far as quoting a site or a page as they do sometimes for static sites, you will see prices that are all over the map with levels of service (not necessarily corresponding to the price levels) also all over the map.

Web development is sort of like farming. You can do it with a stick and a few seeds, or you can use enormous machinery on tracks. Neither answer is necessarily wrong, but they are different solutions designed to meet different needs.

lhtown said:

It isn't a bad way of doing things, but it is usually far more productive to do coding inside of a more advanced framework like Drupal, ruby on rails, django, joomla or one of the hundreds of others that are out there.

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I agree with most of what you say. But the advanced development frameworks simply are too advanced for the person who wants 5 quick static pages out there. Also, you better know clearly and certainly what you are doing in terms of seo with the large frameworks. Fancy frameworks go only so far and most of them have serious problems still today in terms of seo. Yes, nothing that a good code monkey cannot fix in a day or so, but nevertheless.

With dreamweaver a professional developer can develop a great proof of concept, a great small site, a great css framework or any connection to any database that you can even think about - very very fast - but you need to be real and understand your tool. On a very professional webmaster forum some of the real greats out there are still hacking out large sites in dreamweaver, finding it faster than ruby, joomla or heavens .. drupal, where everyone can see just what your development platform is, unless you recode seriously. At least with Joomla there is some great and inspired template work out there that makes it not look like 'just another joomla site'.

For quick development, I still choose dreamweaver if a developer really wants his/her hands on it .. second for me I guess would be joomla. But this is a personal thing. I guess I come from the time where we hacked out sites in a unix editor - vee-eye or emacs .

I am late to this discussion and I am NOT a programmer but I have been developing several wikispaces for months and I love it. The design is simple and the rules make everyone's pages look coherent.

I teach a lot of design in my class because we do publish a lot of creative content to the web. I agree it would be great to have a class for people to learn how to design a webpage. My friend in Santiago designs pages and his flash and music kill me.

As far as seo it is amazing how this works. I love being first on google for stuff. It happens occasionally.

Real coders use Notepad

Real coders use Notepad

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been there done that. too much typing…

Robert said:

Real coders use Notepad

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Ha! Real coders use VI! Notepad is a Windows application and no serious developer uses Windows. (poke in the eye). <ha>

lhtown said:

Web development is sort of like farming. You can do it with a stick and a few seeds, or you can use enormous machinery on tracks. Neither answer is necessarily wrong, but they are different solutions designed to meet different needs.

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Ah, er, I beg to differ. I think you are over-simplifying the goal of what you are doing.

In farming you are not just trying to grow crops. Just as in web development you are not just trying to generate code.

The goal of farming is to solve a larger problem, feeding one to many people. If you are only feeding a few you can use your hoe and back to till the soil. If you are feeding many then you should use your fancy machinery.

The goal of web development, which is software development, is not to generate the software but rather to address a business problem. If the business problem can be addressed with static HTML pages then that is what you should use. If the business problem requires a more complex solution then you can use a suite of tools.

Just as the farmer using massive machinery to till his personal garden is wasting time, effort and money, so too is the software developer who uses overly powerful tools to provide a relatively simple business solution. Often times, simpler is quite honestly better.

And always remember the age old problem with software development; requirements will change. You might not be the one addressing that change so the software solution needs to be very maintainable.

So while we geeks might want to use all of our fancy tools we have to remember that mere mortals tread amongst us.

Just my two pesos worth...

I can see I touched a nerve here. Pretty soon, this is going to turn into Slashdot.

Maybe we should switch the subject to something more benign like politics or religion.

I really didn't mean to hijack this thread. Honest.