Have to make a webpage. :(

[stev0]

I work for a realestate company here in my home town. About two years ago one of the realtors went and made a website for them, now it needs a drastic overhaul and I was recruited to make it for them. They told me to take what they have now and make it new.... each of the 26 realtors needs to have their own page, showing pictures and info of each of their listings as well as a searchable database of all the listings. New graphics, new layout all that good stuff, a company history site, which i keep asking for the history of the company and no one says anything. Well i was given this assignment about a week ago, today they asked me why their site wasn't different, my response was that it wasen't close to being finished. Of course their was a lot of freaking out, but I'm still taking classes trying to get though school and can only spend a few hours a day working on it, around 5 at the max. I keep telling them it is going to take me about 3 weeks to one full month to have everything up and going and they keep saying that it needs to be done by the end of the week... Can someone tell me an acceptable time span that a project like this would take if it was being done perfessionally. Also, the reason they didn't get it done professionally was because it would've been too expensive, or so they thought and that it would take too long, they wouldn't tell me how much they said it would cost or how long it would take.

It's really no big of a deal, i have made webpages before and enjoy doing it, it's just they expect so much in so little time and it is really fustrating me.

Thanks all for reading my little half-rant.

 

[Ausm]

Use FP 2000 makes it a realtivly easy task then


Ausm

 

[Alienwho]

I hope you're getting a bigass paycheck for this.

 

[GooberPHX420]

<< I hope you're getting a bigass paycheck for this. >>



damn right.

 

[stev0]

haha the pay isn't bad for a college student.. I'm using a combo of fireworks/dreamweaver and a little bit of photoshop, I'm trying to make the transition to fireworks but it's lacking a lot in the graphical design area.

anyone have any idea on how long it should take to do something like this?

 

[Kilrsat]

There is a difference in this case of how long it would take to do it, and how long it would take to do it right.

You probably could slap some ugly thing together at 5 hours a night for a week, but your estimate of 3-4 weeks is probably closer to the actual time needed to for this kind of thing to be done well.

 

[Ornery]

I'd tell them, if it had been done right the first time, you wouldn't have to do it over! Tell, them it's going to take time to do it right, but once it's done, it will be easy to update and keep current.

I'd look into using a PHP based site. Don't ask me how to do it, or what is involved, because I've still got to learn all about it myself. From what I have heard about it, your situation would be a perfect use for it. Might as well do it right this time, since you're starting from scratch again...

 

[yoda291]

Here's what you should do. Create one good page and use that as a template across the whole site. A good template should only take 4-5 hours to hard code, but then you can edit everything with dreamweaver and churn out pages in a matter of minutes. Of course, you exaggerate how much work it actually takes and pad the paycheck. The database synchronization might be a big tougher, but that shouldn't take more than 15 or so hours to set up and integrate. If those 26 realtors need that "I love my cat look"...try to convince them otherwise. It's my experience having the same general look across the entire site makes it infinitely cleaner and nicer lookin. Take a look at some of the sites you peruse every day. Anand's site is very professional looking and has the same look all across the board. HardOCP does the same. Big boys like IBM, MS, yahoo, amazon all seem to follow this, so I think it seems to work very well as a general design concept. Besides, there are lots of little advantages that come with a few general templates rather than multiple pages. Bandwidth usage goes down because you re-use the same pictures and formatting. Easier to navigate. there are others, but I'm tired.

 

[stev0]

yea I was looking into php, i have a friend that does webpages for a job on the side and uses php all the time, but I'm pretty sure that I don't have that much time to learn php.