Reply To: Fantastic news.

[amcnea]

So, given that no one knows expression engine around here, I just posted a job on the ee sites.

I downloaded the Expression Engine Core 1.6.8 today, and it doesn’t look very difficult and I don’t have a problem with learning it. I also don’t have a problem with designing the site for free. The problem which I have with EE is that it seems far more difficult to make a complete redesign of the site.

For instance that Demo which I made took me about 8-10 hours of work with probably about 2-3 hours just spent on the top logo. The rest of the time was spent searching for the template, finding the appropriate modules, cropping the other images, searching for images on google, and copy and pasting info into the site. I probably spent less then 1 hour actually working on the site layout, color schema, and things of that nature.

With EE it seems to me like the site layout, color schema, etc. will take far longer then it does with Joomla. Probably on the time scale of a week instead of an hour. My concern would be investing a week into a site layout only to hear at the end “we don’t like this, that, and the other thing. Do it over.” Which isn’t very uncommon in the web-site design game. With Joomla if something like that happens, I haven’t lost very much. With EE the loss seems to be far grater.

How we usually handle this is by pairing off with an artist. We have the client talk to the artist who conceptualizes the website and makes the layout. This is usually stored in an image or PDF of EXACTLY how the website will look. Once this image has been created and approved by the client then the PDF is handed to a developer such as myself. The developer then takes the PDF and turns into the final web-site. This process generally cost somewhere between $5,000 to $20,000 depending on complexity and time. I don’t usually go this route, but my brother has done this sort of thing on his spare time. He has gone through a site called lucky dog or something like that.

Now, just for a joomla site which takes me about 5-8 days to set up, get approval for, etc. I will usually charge about $2,000 to $4,000 per site.
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Anyways, I would be hesitant to go through the effort of creating an EE site without knowing EXACTLY how you want the site to look like. A possible solution to this would be to make the site in joomla initially until you have something that you want to go live with. And the Joomla site can then act as the PDF file generated by the artist. I can then take that and turn it into the EE site as previously discussed.

My guess is that you will run into this same hesitation about site-layout for any EE designer. Especially for the price you offered. Because a single redo of the site could basically eat up the entire budget.