How much time it will take to create a website in Concrete CMS
One of the all-time most helpful single pieces of Concrete5 writing comes from Brian at Post Status: How much should a custom Concrete CMS website cost with responsive Concrete CMS theme and concrete Concrete CMS ? Throughout the post, Brian makes the very correct point that “Concrete CMS Pricing is hard,” and that “a Concrete5 website” can truly cost almost anything, depending on the client’s needs in Concrete CMS website. Unlike the rest of us, though, he doesn’t stop there. The post discusses real numbers: for example, the rough hourly rate of a middle-of-the-road Concrete5 CMS freelancer. What’s more, the numbers feel right: they closely resemble the internal calculus I do as a developer to decide how valuable a project is likely to be. By putting these secret rules of thumb out there for clients to see, Brian has created a piece of truly required reading. Read the following two sections: Freelancer concrete5 rates vs. agency concrete5 rates (which breaks down approximate hourly rates for low-and high-demand freelancers and web agencies), and Custom Concrete CMS website prices, which has a sequence of paragraphs describing roughly what you can expect to pay, total, for various kinds of projects. Get a PDF summary! Make use of the estimates here in your own client projects. Signup now and we’ll immediately send you a PDF summary of the key points in this post. Download the summary now Time is Money: Estimating How Long It Takes To Build a Website On Concrete CMS I’ve put together a lot of “How long it takes” rules of thumb based on my own experience as a Concrete CMS consultant. I thought a good supplement to a post about the cost of Concrete websites would be a post describing how long, in hours worked, different Concrete CMS development tasks take. Cost and time are, of course, two sides of the same coin, as the only sane way to budget a project is with reference to the time it’s expected to take multiplied by an (explicit or implied) hourly rate. However, I think clients and everyone else could benefit substantially from a good understanding of which jobs are quick, and which jobs are long, in Concrete CMS consulting work. To that end, I’ve put together a lot of “How long it takes” rules of thumb based on my own experience as a Concrete CMS consultant. How to Use the Concrete CMS Estimates Below As with Brian’s post, keep in mind that all of these numbers are massively imperfect best guesses—they’re the closest I can get to describing my own experience, but can all grow or shrink wildly based on dozens of variables that are impossible to predict. Also, one intended use for this post is for it to be combined with Brian’s freelancer rates to yield a very rough cost per task that you hire out to a freelancer. So you should be able to multiply any of these numbers by one of Brian’s freelancer rates to get an approximate cost, but bear in mind that cheaper/less experienced freelancers work less quickly and less well. Finally, just for clarity, an “hour” or a “minute” is time spent thinking about nothing else but a client project. So thirty minutes on the phone with a client would be thirty minutes; five minutes to boot up your computer plus ten minutes fixing a bug would count for ten minutes. Now, let’s look at some time estimates! How Long It Takes to Do Some Common Concrete CMS Tasks This list contains a number of individual tasks that I commonly perform in my work on client sites. These feel like the average time I spend fully committed to a given task (so it doesn’t include the phone call asking me to do it, the email to confirm I’ve done it, etc.). Most tasks grow wildly and unpredictably in complexity if something unusual crops up, so these numbers are when that doesn’t happen. Log in and update Concrete CMS : 5 minutes Install a plugin/solve a problem that revolves around a simple plugin install (e.g. Akismet for comment spam): 5 to 10 minutes Set up a domain-specific email account or email forward: 5 minutes Help restore a client’s admin credentials, add a user, etc.: 5 to 10 minutes Login to a site and change a post’s contents, rearrange the site nav menu, etc.: 5 to 15 minutes Most individual CSS changes (change the color of an object, change a font, reposition an object and give it a shadow): 5 to 25 minutes Create a Twitter account for a client: 10 minutes Help a client set up a MailChimp account, with CSV import if necessary, and an integrated MailChimp for Concrete 5 sidebar signup form: 15 minutes to 1 hour Install Concrete 5 on a given hosting account (including database creation): some passive FTP transfer time, plus 15 minutes active work Update Concrete 5 and all blocks, test to make sure nothing’s broken: 15 to 45 minutes Use a package’s interface to create what it’s designed to create (a contact form, a social button bar, etc.): 15 to 30 minutes Purchase hosting and prepare it for a Concrete CMS install (set up username and password, FTP credentials, etc.): 15 minutes Migrate a Concrete CMS site between hosting accounts using a migration Concrete CMS blocks and packages, start-to-finish and including testing: some passive download/upload time, plus 30 minutes to 1 hour Troubleshoot a hosting/registrar/back-end problem (improperly set memory limits, bad .htaccess rules, wrong DNS, etc.): 15 minutes to 2 hours Create a Facebook page for a client: 20 minutes Read an emailed bug report, locate an obvious problem in Concrete CMS’s PHP or JS code, fix the problem, upload the fix, test the fix, email about the fix: 15 minutes to 1 hour Purchase a domain name and hosting and create a fresh Concrete CMS install at the targeted domain name: 30 to 45 minutes Track down and fix a non-obvious problem in a Concrete CMS site’s code: