• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

How much would a website much like....

next-Jin

next-Jin

Supreme [H]ardness
2FA
Joined
Mar 29, 2006
Messages
7,403
Facebook or myspace cost to design? I am starting to hash out the website along with other members of my team. The backend of those sites along with quality, extremely professional and clean design. (not myspace)

We will have around 10,000 dollars to finance the startup along with hosting. Possible site traffic could be upwards of 2,000 - 5,000 a month for the first 3 months.

EDIT: Also if you know of a Design Firm capable of such a project, we do not believe this could be a one man process. Browsing through the internet is taking an incredible amount of time. Seems like there are thousands of companies out there :p
 
You could always use an established platform such as Dolphin: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/ Single Domain is about $800 for the license.

There are countless others, but from what I've seen Dolphin is fairly solid. There are also a couple of open source ones as well. Such as Elgg http://elgg.org/ Free, under the GNU GPL, v2.

Depending on what type of support you want available, there are plenty of other platforms available. Also once you pick a platform, you can have your own custom/unique style designed for it.

Just do a Google search for "social networking script"
 
That's a good question, and one that's hard to answer to in this space. If you want something like Facebook or Myspace, then I would say this would take upwards of 80-100k, maybe more to develop a first generation social networking site. There are open "social network" platforms already build that you could spend your 10k on and modify it to your needs. Which, brings up another question, what do you hope to accomplish? If you're looking for another social networking site by definition, then I would go with a free product like Boonex, demo available at http://www.boonex.us/.

However, if you're looking for something a little different than myspace, facebook, friendster or the like, this would likely be something you would have to build from the ground up and again, would be very expensive (I would estimate 500k). IMHO, 10k would be grossly insufficient for that endeavor.

Hope this helps. It's only one person's opinion though, I would only hope that you could get a significant amount accomplished for that amount of money!

Cheers!
 
a lot. Thousands. Just having one person work for 3 weeks with a respectable salary will run you around 4k.
 
next-Jin said:
Facebook or myspace cost to design? I am starting to hash out the website along with other members of my team. The backend of those sites along with quality, extremely professional and clean design. (not myspace)

We will have around 10,000 dollars to finance the startup along with hosting. Possible site traffic could be upwards of 2,000 - 5,000 a month for the first 3 months.

EDIT: Also if you know of a Design Firm capable of such a project, we do not believe this could be a one man process. Browsing through the internet is taking an incredible amount of time. Seems like there are thousands of companies out there :p
Click to expand...
This is certainly not a one-man process if you want it completed in a decent amount of time. Your startup capital of 10 thousand dollars seems insufficient compared to the data schema, architecture, business rule design, graphics, and development costs. That amount becomes even less sufficient when you factor infrastructure and CoLo costs.

Breaking down a list of core features required with some pseudo use cases will help. With as big of a comparison as was made with "like Facebook or MySpace", you'll need to detail this better than a simple gloss-over. Get that spec'ed and estimated first, and weigh against your startup capital. Also factor in monthly CoLo/infrastructure costs, or a dedicated hosting service. Things will likely become a lot clearer in terms of what you can handle initially and over time through improvements.
 
Actually, you forgot about the big money-sink. Marketing.

You may build a better facebook, but if no one knows who the hell you are, it doesn't mean a thing.

A couple million dollars to get yourself marketed in a completely saturated area might be just enough to get a few people onto your site.
 
jgoewert said:
Actually, you forgot about the big money-sink. Marketing.

You may build a better facebook, but if no one knows who the hell you are, it doesn't mean a thing.

A couple million dollars to get yourself marketed in a completely saturated area might be just enough to get a few people onto your site.
Click to expand...

Viral marketing can be cheap if you've got the creativity to get it started. Use existing social networking sites and major forums like 4chan to drop links to youtube videos and other low-cost ad venues.

A big part of getting a serious SN site up these days is going to be making it attractive to at least one group. The hipsters are always looking for something shiny and unknown that can be theirs until it goes mainstream.
 
Wasn't Facebook or MySpace developed by some college kid? They must have started out with a small and basic framework for next to nothing?
 
What do you mean by "Design"? Layout? Do the stock artwork for? Make a demo-able navigation? Or do technical design, too? Or do you actually mean implement--buy servers and software, setup communications, negotiate bandwidth agreements, and so on?
 
cnick79 said:
Wasn't Facebook or MySpace developed by some college kid? They must have started out with a small and basic framework for next to nothing?
Click to expand...

A few hundred grand in venture capital doesn't hurt either.
 
If you have a shoestring budget and no technical people, you're kinda screwed if you wanna start something up.

Honestly, if all you can bring to the table is $10k and some guys with a dream, you're screwed. Bringing in professionals to design, develop & deploy a real website is not going to happen on this sort of budget. If you're lucky, you might be able to pull together some college kids or outsource it - in both cases, you're relying on a fair bit of luck, unless you can write incredibly detailed specifications.

The way that startups get started on shoestring budgets is that they have their own people willing to put in 80 hour weeks & stay up late at night to make sure that things work. They have people that, first thing in the morning, wake up and say "I could $DO_STUFF to make the site better" and then they go do it. If you just pay somebody to develop it, they're going to take your $10k, give you 100 hours of development time & not give it another thought until you cut them another check.

Maybe if you had $50-100k, you might be able to get something realistic off the ground. The best you can hope for with $10k is to get enough of a site to talk more investors into the idea.
 
I have been working on my own project & now I have some new stuff to evaluate.
I am using HostGator & just (manually) installed elgg successfully.

I have been experimenting with a variety of software & themes. I think I have been looking for magic software that will just "give me" the ability to create the workflow & user experience I want for the purpose I am developing - and I've finally realized that it will require custom code no matter what I try, so I really need to work it ALL out on paper...

Today - my buddy told me about - http://iplotz.com
- a little better than scribbling on paper I guess... I have to try it some more.

PS - this might be useful to people interested in this topic:
Webware 100 Winners - http://www.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2009/winners.html?tag=rtcol;inTheNewsNow
 
Last edited:
To help you in the long run, i highly suggest

LLMR Stack

Linux
LightTPD
MYSQL
Rails


I also suggest you look at sites like tumblr and follow what they do. Its taken them over 2 years to get what they have now, with limited personnel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top