A million złoty for a WordPress site
Is that a lot? Online, and especially in the WordPress community, things always boil over at moments like this. How can a site on a free system cost so much? Such sites are made on a ready-made theme for a few quid. Someone rigged the tender! And how is it really? Can a website based on a free CMS cost so much?
Most often we hear messages and disputes of this kind when it concerns a site for some city hall, public body, and tenders come into play.
True, WordPress is a free content management system, which doesn't necessarily mean that creating a portal based on this system is also free. If someone wrote that creating a web service in PHP costs a million złoty, there'd be no problem. After all, everyone knows you have to hire developers. And yet the PHP language is also free.
Table of contents
Tenders
Anyway, let's start with the fact that a website on WordPress for a million isn't a problem. The problem is that hardly any company enters such a tender and there's no one to choose from. Just preparing for the tender and meeting the requirements is already an enormous cost, which is included in the final product.
A company entering a tender has to price the project on the basis of the OPZ (Description of the Subject of the Contract) and the SIWZ (Specification of Essential Terms of the Contract). Unfortunately, these documents are most often prepared by an official who has no idea about IT. Even if it's an in-house IT person, they don't know all the mobile, hosting, RWD and similar solutions. The contract specification is very often written in vague terms or ready-made phrases found somewhere online are simply pasted in. It rarely happens that an external consultant is hired to prepare a good contract specification. Besides, you have to have a fairly large budget planned for that.
Another problem with tenders is various legal and formal constraints. One time you have to prepare a hundred-page documentation, sometimes pay a deposit, maybe a promissory note or bank guarantees, the number of people employed and the like. Things of this kind also affect the price of the project.
Another element affecting the price is different working conditions. Software companies most often work in agile methodologies. They develop web applications from week to week, settling up for successive stages of the project. At the next iteration there's time to consider which element of the software will now be developed, or maybe we drop it in favour of a better or cheaper solution.
Creating software within a tender is a waterfall-type approach. That's why many companies that have so far worked in agile give a much higher quote, in order to have funds for any problems they encounter.
What makes up the price?
A well-made website requires enormous knowledge and experience from many fields related to IT: design, UX, UI, security, optimisation, RWD, preparation for SEO and many others.
It will be best to look at an example commission for building such a service on the basis of the SIWZ for creating two portals based on WordPress. As we can read in the document, the work will include:
- functional analysis of the services,
- preparing a concept of the solution as a Technical Design,
- preparing 6 graphic designs,
- preparing two interactive mockups,
- carrying out usability research on the portal,
- launching a development, test, pre-production and production environment,
- migrating content from the previous services,
- training employees in using WordPress,
- full post-implementation documentation,
- providing warranty, development and maintenance services - SLA 99.4%, for 4 years.
Additionally, the system based on free WordPress is to be integrated with jakdojade.pl, a timetable system, a system for issuing the city card, verify discounts, have interactive maps and be integrated with the CERBER vehicle database.
Is that a lot?
The above project was priced at 1,124,000 zł. In my view this is a very low amount for the amount of work that has to be done and then maintaining the system for 4 years.
As a reminder, the portal of the Public Transport Authority in Warsaw is visited by several tens of thousands of users a day. Maintaining such infrastructure, which can be down for a maximum of just under 4 and a half hours a month (SLA 99.4%), is one of the more expensive elements of the whole project.
If we add to this the cost of training employees, preparing graphic designs, backups, it turns out that this million is too little.
My experience also shows that in all WordPress-related projects, 90% of the time is spent making WordPress into something that it isn't.
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