Cost of Website Redevelopment

Any web developers here? I need a reality check on the cost of website redevelopment. This is an e-commerce site, 100 products, lots of informational and product information pages. Good quality, not something obviously home-grown. I have five quotes. Ranges overlap, but I'd like some thoughts from any small businesses out there that have done this recently. Thanks.

I'd be happy to submit a proposal.

http://www.hyperoptix.com

With 100 products, you may not need much, doing standard e-commerce - but you want something you can build from if you plan to expand your inventory. You can also probably save money by entering the products into the new cart yourself. As for the static pages, do you plan to change them often? How will that be covered?

We were recently quoted about 5G for a homepage, content management system (so we can make changes ourselves), and a custom cart (OS Commerce) with all the bells & whistles - including back-end inventory management & synch with our store POS, API to google base, and such.

If all the vendors are meeting your requirements, go with the one that'll handle expansion/revision & future add-ons the best. Watch out for shopping carts where you risk losing your customizations if you upgrade to a new version. Make sure you have a way to change static page content without their help - either with a WYSIWYG or Contribute or similar. Those are some hidden costs that'll get you down the road - which is what some of the lowball vendors are counting on.

yourself and do it. That's always been my technique. Now that I'm no longer operating a commercial site, I write web content for others, usually working with a web developer. People are sometimes surprised that they have to pay someone to write the content on their site. Then, they try it themselves. It doesn't work out that well unless they know what they're doing.

Then, there are SEO issues, and that's another expense, but one that pays for itself.

These days, web sites aren't cheap.