$705k for redesigning a website?
March 24th, 2009 by
Russell Wilson
Wow… and I thought I wasn’t cheap!
According to this article, the City of Austin will vote this week on awarding a contract to a California company to “redesign their existing website.” I’m sure it’s a large site with a fairly complex structure, and they do want the company to migrate all existing content over to the new site. A CMS will be involved (of course). But I’m having a hard time getting to “$705k”. Ironically, that’s the “low” bid. Two Austin-based companies bid on this for around $1.3m (forcing the city to consider the out of state offer)!
WHY didn’t they call me… why…
I don't think the US Government knows about the real pricing for designing anything thesedays. They overpay all their defense contractors and in this case, web designers.
I should try and get more Government contracts. But then I'd be a slimeball ripping off Uncle Sam.
This is not uncommon. I worked on a state government department website site last year and the budget from end to end was $5m. This involved a CMS implementation, migration, IA, usability research and design and the merging of 30 separate sites with a total of over 100,000 content items.
They do everything big in texas, don't they?
Well I remember the days when web people didn't have to find minimum wage jobs off craigslist. You're all acting like this is a fortune, where in fact it's just reasonable
My neighbor's kid would have done the entire site for 200 bucks and he's local!
Anyone remember back in the day of the golden age of web development? Not the much ado of the Web 2.0/web 3.0 talk but of the tech Bubble days of companies with high IPO evaluations, multi-millionaires in Stock, and everyone dreaming of being the next Bill Gates or Michael Eisner. At several of my past companies (THINK New Ideas), enterprise level web applications costing $500k+ were not uncommon. Sapient tends to get clients at this scale even today.
If the Austin Texas web firms are bidding $1.3m and the “winning” firm is bidding half of that total…. Eh.. something is wrong with this picture.
That price not out of line for a website of such scale and complexity. The team to build such a website would include a team of engineers, usability specialists, production, design, marketing, etc. I don't imagine it's going to be a 6-page site that will be slapped together in a weekend. The city could save much more than the 705K in the long run if the new website makes tasks more efficient (and less frustrating) for the citizens of Austin and for state employees.
Hi, I'm a design director, and have been involved in many engagements such as this one. This pricing is totally inline for a site of this scale. When you look at the resources and time for this kind of project, there's nothing wrong with this number, and it is, in fact, low. When integrity of the information is involved, the amount of testing, automation, etc, goes way up, and therefore, the project costs do as well.
Don't get me wrong – I've personally responded to and won a $6.5m project in the past (with a large retail store). That project was literally immense… and the price was easily justified.
But I'm just not seeing what the complexity is in this project (and admit that I don't know enough of the details).
If it's to integrate all the city departments into one site than I'd say it's too low and they'd better watch their project schedule. City governments can quickly eat up a lot of project hours.
I guess we can wait to see the final product and then judge. I'm sure the requirements are grander than what they have now.
As long as it doesn't cut into the frisbee golf course funds that are part of the stimulus package. Austin desparately needs another frisbee golf course for $800M and the 4 jobs it will create will hopefully cure the recession.
For a full redesign of a site which apparently clocks in at 80k+ pages of content, it seems low to me. I'll bet in 18 months the company that won it will consider their low bid a serious mistake.
“If the Austin Texas web firms are bidding $1.3m and the “winning” firm is bidding half of that total…. Eh.. something is wrong with this picture.” Agreed. I'm guessing the project bids are so large because there's some weird legacy/proprietary stuff to deal with (as is the case with so many government & educational sites). But if Austin is taking the lowest bid at _half_ the other offers, they'll only get what they're paying for. Too bad.
The next highest bidder was $600,000 MORE expensive. 35% of the project has been outsourced to two Texas/Austin web development companies. The rest of the work will be done by Cignex-hired Austin web developers.
Do you know how to perform a re-architecture of 80,000 web pages using the Zope/Plone CMS platform? $700,000 too much? How long would it take for you to convert 1 web page from standard HTML to the Zope/Plone CMS using CSS-only formatting (as required in the RFP)? 10 minutes per page? That's 13,000+ hours of work. You'd need to work for 24 hours a day for 555 days straight at 10 minutes a page. Knock yourself out. That's only about $50/hour.
So $6.5m for a large retailer easily makes sense, but one-ninth of that seems silly-large on a site for a city of one million, unifying dozens of departments, including tons of legacy material, full transaction support/service for all city functions and payment processing, and surely working to comply with more regulations than the average business site …
And on top of all that (as stated by the city), creating a model of social networking, blogging and civic participation? You may need a few more of the details.
An earlier RFP for the same project included meeting with each department separately to gather requirements. That in itself could be an expensive process.
After learning more about the project (from comments here and information sent to me by other readers), I have a much clearer picture. This is a big project – a high cost is certainly justified. My key hangup is the difference in the bids. Would you ever see a gap that large in anything but software?
Interesting post. Appreciate it as I have seen something new now.
I have intimate knowledge of this RFP, and in fact participated with the two Austin firms to estimate the scope. I can assure you the City of Austin (and I love this town) was not forthcoming with many of the details needed to accurately scope and price the program. In fact, 750K would only have covered a small set of the requested functionality. There are literally dozens of databases and public record stores that need to be designed, integrated, unified, and rationalized under a common design language system (visual & interactive) …. each one is a separate application today.
I will be very surprised if any one can successfully complete and deploy this program for less than 3 million.
– CDA
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Very useful information. Thanks for this. You got a great blog .I will be interested in more similar topics.I’m very interested in CMS and all its related subjects.
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This is kind of outrageous, and I am amazed that there hasn’t been more writing about this online. I am also amazed by the differences in the bids!
This was a great read though! Thanks..