Web Advice

Mandingo

Shared on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 11:39
Because I work at a non-profit it's often hard to find good help for cheap money. In this case I'm specifically talking about web/interactive services. We have a pretty lousy guy right now that does our updates whenever he eventually gets around to it. I can send him 30 emails in a week ranging from polite to "hey shithead, where are the updates" and then 3 weeks later you get a one line email that says "changes done, have a good weekend ". No explanation or anything.

Which leads me to my current problem. I'm looking to get a new webmaster and possibly make some site changes. I've met with a few different people and have a few different directions that I could go. The first one is the usual. A company with a designer and some code writers who can do whatever you want, if the money is right. Most updates and changes will go through them and we'll have to pay their hourly rate. For them to make parts of the back end of the site user friendly and accessible to us will cost 700-1000.

The second option is purchasing a "pre-built" site or a framework that I can update, customize or change anytime I want. The back end of the site looks like a forum tool bar with all the fonts and links, it's very strait forward. I'm looking specifically at dotnetnuke. Do you guys have any experience with that company?

The initial purchase of the skin and setup will cost about a grand to $1500 but once that is done and our hosting is transfered I can do all the changes and layout on my own from my desktop and don't have to pay for changes.

Thoughts?

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EDIT:
After the comments below I did some quick research.  I don't even know if I could figure out how to install DNN on my own let alone use it.  That crap seems complicated.  Maybe its worth it for someone else to do, just not THAT worth it.

Comments

megatek's picture
Submitted by megatek on Thu, 06/05/2008 - 15:00
The install do DNN really isn't too bad just figuring out where the connection to the database goes was tricky. Then again I have a knack for that type of stuff.
sergeantdilbert's picture
Submitted by sergeantdilbert on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 11:58
It's hard to know what you need without hearing all of your requirements. Have you looked at Microsoft's small business site? They have some tools that let you do quite a few things fairly inexpensively: http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/hub.mspx
megatek's picture
Submitted by megatek on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 12:05
With dotnetnuke you would pretty much be paying $1500 for a skin since DNN is open source.
Mandingo's picture
Submitted by Mandingo on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 12:32
We own 2 domains that are hosted through godaddy right now. They are pretty old school looking and clunky. They have a few "modules" and databases that would need to be included. mega- that's kind of what I was thinking. A decent skin is maybe 80-$100 so I don't completely understand where all the other charges would come from. At the same time I never got into any of the web stuff so it's all a bit beyond me. How much work does it take to pull one site down, move hosting and pop emails and put another site up?????
JeepChick's picture
Submitted by JeepChick on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 12:39
My favorite color is purple. :)

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