How much $ to have a website made?

Haha I can do that. I'm thinking it might be slightly more complicated though.

Hi mate,

You will need to look around on Google for the specifics, but here is what you will need:

1. A hosting account. This is an account that is usually paid for monthly for a company to host your website on their server. Try GoDaddy, Hostgator, Arvixe, etc. (about $12 per month)
2. A domain name. You will need to register a domain name that has not been chosen, most hosting companies will allow you to purchase a domain name as well as hosting (easier if you use one company for both) . (about $12 per year).
3. You need the site. Go to www.wordpress.org - download the software and install it onto your hosting account/server (use FileZilla, or follow instructions from your hosting company)
4. Follow the famous 5 minute installation that comes with Wordpress.
5. There's your site!
6. Find a nice Wordpress theme

I urge you to just do it yourself. IM is a huge learning curve. Create your first website and you will feel invinsible!

-Dave

It depends what you're looking for, but it is not as expensive as many think. If you're looking to make a complex website similar to Craigslist, you need to shop around a little bit between designers/programmers. There's plenty right here in the Warriors For Hire section as well, or you can try some freelance websites such as elance. Might cost you anywhere from a few 100 or more.

I agree with the few hundred dollar estimate.

Josiah, are you planning on constructing a classified ads website just like Craigslist?

Wordpress has a classifieds plugin that will allow you to do something similar (albeit on a smaller scale). I'm not sure what exactly your requirements are for your website, but you should take a look at Another Wordpress Classifieds Plugin - Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin | Classified Ads in Minutes For Your Wordpress Site

The free version is pretty capable in itself, but there are additional premium modules that you can purchase to extend its functionality.

Paul

You guys are crazy. Wordpress will not be good enough for a classified website. Something on the scale of craigslist is HUGE. And whoever said a couple hundred is also insane. I built a classified site just like craigslist, but built it on a 100% custom CMS based in ruby on rails. That site was a $45,000 site, mainly because of the custom CMS.

A classified site on a big level like that is going to cost you. A couple hundred will get you a page or two.... a couple thousand will get you someone to START the project for you, but you're looking at about $5,000-$10,000 for something like that. If you just need an extension or module for this, then cool, easy to do yourself. But a real site that you would monetize, will cost you.

People for some reason think that you can get clones of major websites for a few hundred. I am one of the most affordable, professional web designers out there, and a very very basic site can be done for $300 with me, but typically we do sites in the $1,000 range. We actually recently had an investment group contacting us about building a social network, something along the lines of facebook. The quote we gave was $300,000. People on craigslist are asking for the same thing, and expecting to pay $500. It just isn't going to happen.

You can even do it for $1 but there are many other things than price too.

If you do not want to spend any money, use article marketing. Writing articles & submit to article directories. You can also try free sources like squidoo, hub pages, etc.

If you want to build websites of your own, you have to buy domains ($7) & hosting plan (depends on where you buy from). Install wordpress sites on your domains & you are good to go.

Wow, what a night. This is my third try to post to this thread... I really hope this one "takes" because I'm getting weary of re-typing essentially the same response. It feels like I'm manually "spinning" this response...

You really need to be sure of what you mean by "nearly as complex as craigslist". The costs are considerably different depending on what you mean.

Right off the bat, you are going to need an "old school" coding webmaster or developer that can implement your vision from scratch. That doesn't mean he or she actually will, because if they have done this before, they aren't likely to code it all from scratch each time, but it means they need to be ABLE to do it. Someone that has a bunch of Wordpress sites under their belt isn't even in the ballpark. Anyone (and I DO mean ANYONE) can get a Wordpress site up and running fairly easily.

You are going to need to ask yourself at least the following to get started:

What features do you want to support?

What is your audience? What do they expect to see?

How "fancy" do you want the site to appear? (most craigslist type sites are pretty basic looking, and get really junky if you try to make them more "artful")

How do you plan to monetize the site? There is a big difference between adding some adsense or other paid advertisements and creating other, paid (subscription or per post) features. Craigslist provides most things free but charges for job offerings... Coding requirements are considerably different as you add paid postings...

What about history? If you plan to have the site be "current only" then you need to expire posts and such. If not, you will need some sort of search mechanism so people can find older posts that are relevant to their needs.

Are the "free" areas going to allow or limit certain features? (Can I post a comment and embed HTML code or a backlink to my site?)

Are you going to approve posts, or do they "go live" immediately without review?

What's your long term plan? Do you want to put up a "demonstration" site to prove your concept, then move (seamlessly to your customers) to a properly coded site that requires minimal maintenance?

Are you willing to spend some up-front money to develop a throwaway demonstration site to prove your concept, or do you want a final solution out of the box?

How much money do you have to spend? If you don't have financial backing of some sort, you may want to consider a throwaway to prove your business plan, then recode for the long term.

Answering these (and other) questions will allow you to become more clear about what you want, and this clarity is essential to getting even a decent ballpark cost to develop such a site. Above all, you need to be sure your potential developer can do it. Look for some examples or past sites to show comeptence before giving them a deposit to proceed.

When I was doing websites for a living I put together a couple of these sites. The last one I did, I charged $1500 plus 5% of the gross for maintenance. Thus, I got the site online at a lower cost and there was some incentive for me to make it more efficient. On the other hand, if I had been more astute about this client, I would have charged her for the time expended (about $3500) with hourly maintenance, because she decided she didn't want to continue with the program a few months later, when she didn't get the hundreds of thousands of visitors she expected from her radio program. (I told her traffic would be harder to get than she thought, her radio show just didn't have that many listeners and the site needed external traffic to be successful...) [sigh] Lessons learned all around.

In today's dollars, I would expect a cost in the 3-5 thousand range to completely develop and implement such a site, unless you can find someone offshore with the needed expertise, yet still willing to work cheap. If I were still doing web development for others and had the time, I could probably whack together a "demonstration" site for a thousand dollars or so in about a week, but the maintenance costs would bury you in a few months if it became really successful. On the other hand, the thousand might be a reasonable cost to prove your business model, with the plan to change over to a fully developed site once you know the concept works. Only you and your business plan can tell if this approach is a viable one.

OK, it's a long and probably convoluted response to what seemed at first to be a simple question. The problem is that questions of this sort have ramifications you may not immediately be aware of, and if you are going to be successful, you need to look a bit more closely before you jump in, so to speak. This advice is provided as much for you as for all the other people that may have a similar question but haven't got around to asking.

P.S. How about that... Third time's the charm!
Good luck and Good Evening from Hawaii!

P.P.S to my previous post.

Just saw the reply ty iAmNameLess:

I'm glad I'm able to do what I need, because the costs of development have increased more than I thought.

Of course, there are a wide variety of people and services out there, so I don't know if he's on the high or the low side of current costs, but it is a viable data point.
I do agree with him about the level needed (which you can see from my post) and about the mistaken expecatation that you can get something for nearly nothing these days (not his words).

Given the sheer amount of low dollar work available offshore, there seems to be an expectation that everyone can afford to provide services for nearly nothing. This is anything but the case. Everyone needs to mae a living, and the cost of living is quite different offshore than it is in the US. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of 'ripoff sites' created by essentially copying existing sites (by both offshore and domestic people) that has tried to drive prices down, and set extremely low expectations. I hope that trend does not continue. I would rather see honest development performed as needed, but not everyone shares my view...

Anyway, and back on topic, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the numbers provided by iAmNameLess are the mid-range price for the services at this time...

You can hire a programmer on
1. scriptlance.com
2. elance.com
3. rentacoder.com
just describe you want a site similair as craiglist. You will get a cheap bid from programmer. If you're lucky you will get high quality job for just below $200.
I hope it helps you.
Good luck

Be careful my friend...lots of crappy products AND people out there...make sure you get the job done right, mistakes suck...do your research.

Just go to the coder, waiting for you in the freelancing sites.

Tell them your requirements in the job description and wait for the reply from the coder.

Choose a coder who will give a comparatively low rate but have portfolio and good feedback score and comment. You may get a professional site spending only $150.

Here are some good outsourcing sites...

01.eLance
02.oDesk
03.Guru
04.vWorker
05.Freelancer
06.getacoder

iAmNameLess and I would be best buds. I too prefer to remain nameless in this forum and create websites full-time for clients around the world and have for 15 years. When newb's call me on the phone and the first question out of their mouth is "how much money...." it tells me right away the person has no clue what this stuff is all about. So, I tell them they're not ready for me and to go to craigslist or elance and hire someone for their hundred bucks and then call me in six months when they're ready to pull their hair out. That's when they'll be ready to think of the project as a "real business" and have a real budget to play with and they will see the need for a real team. Getting ANY website is not just "getting a website" but is following a process. And, any process takes way longer than 3 or 4 hours just in planning alone...craigslist clone or otherwise. And, no one that is even mildly successful at this will need to take on your project for less than top dollar.

But seriously, folks, it really depends on exactly what you want done. Could be as low as $100 and could be as high as $10K. Really depends. Think you just need to shop around.