5 Ways to Estimate the Cost to Build a Website

I had a friend come to me the other day. He had a web proposal in his hand. As soon as he gave it to me, I knew the next two questions.

Is it a fair price?
How much would you charge for it?

Now to be clear, I know how to develop a pretty decent website. But I do not do it for a living. I do it if the idea strikes me as particularly interesting. Or I do it as a favor for a friend. Less and Less do I do it as the later, it tends to sour the friendship, which I value more than the money.

So I thought I'd give you a few points that I use to "smell test" a proposal or create an estimate.

1: What pages are going to be built?

Look at the site map, if there is none...ignore any quotes, hours or estimates...go make one and come back and try again. The developer has to understand the scope of what you need built. Real Estate agents need to know how many rooms and bathrooms you want in your house. Web developers need to know how many pages and what concepts are on those pages.

2: What's the hourly rate
There is no particular right answer for this one. However the rate will usually indicate the type of work that will be turned out. Less then $25 an hour, your going to get a pretty basic site. More than $50, your going to get a pretty good site. I've seen rates as low as $10/hr and ones as high as $200/hr. More often then not, they came out as the price would indicate. Note: There will be exceptions to this rule!

3: Do you need artwork?
Is the developer providing the artwork? Are you ok with this? A lot of folks don't understand that the art of a website and the workings of a website take two different mindsets. Art can consists of 40% or more of the cost of the project. Personally, I do "ok" artwork. If someone wants the best of the best I refer them to www.99designs.com. You decide on a price and you get the best artwork possible for that price. Either way art can be a big part of the cost.

4: Cost of the Template
The first thing I calculate is the template. This is how the site would look with no real content. Almost like a mockup. By default a template takes about 1 full work days to make. Add 2 days if I have to make the artwork. So it's either 8 or 24 hours depending on the art.

5: Cost of each Page
This one is a bit harder for the novice but think on it. Take each page, would you consider it "basic"? Meaning nothing is personalized for a visitor to the page and content is updated very rarely. This type of page would take 4 hours. Wanting any of the following adds about 4 to 8 hours a page.

• Personalized
• Change the content daily
• Ads
• Photo book
• Selling a product*
  

When in doubt...I just do 8 hours for the full page.

In summary

So there you have it, this would be how I gauge a websites cost. An example:

Home
About
Contact us
Service
Products
-- Online Book
-- Special Gadget
-----------------------
8 hours for template
16 hours for 4 basic pages
16 hours for 2 product pages
-----
40 hours x $50/hr
$2,000

I usually advise the client that the estimate will go up or down 20% as we work through the details. I then follow through and update them as changes happen.




Apps, Programs and Special Features
If you want a web application (calendars, wiki, blogs, to-do list, etc) or special things that the user can do on your site, I will tactfully direct the person to find something that exists on the web already and pay their fee. In all reality building those things from scratch will cost more than they are willing to pay. If they insist, then I usually will do a different quote as those things tend to take a lot of time (money).

Selling
A lot of folks want to sell something on their website. The easiest method that I have used is paypal. Normally it takes about 10 hours to integrate this into a site. There are a number of alternatives to paypal. There are also a number of sites that allow you to sell on the web without having to go through a web developer. If you just want to sell online, I'd advise you to research this. (ejunkie.com)

Build a site for $400
Sometimes you'll run across things were someone is building sites at $400 a pop. Or $50/page or some type of special that really makes things cheap. Two pieces of advice. First, this is usually someone who is just starting a business and wants to get as many new customers as possible. They may develop quality sites, they may not. Second, you get what you paid for. Go look at there past work, or ask them for a sample. If you are looking for a basic/cheap site, this route is the best way to go. If you want/need to look very professional, you may want to avoid these deals.

Accuracy of Estimates
Well, they ain't called estimates for nothing. As web development goes very rarely will a developer "lock" their cost to build a website. This is because you, the client, never knows what you like until I, the developer, have built it. I tell folks my estimates have an 80% accuracy. That can be a $400 swing on a $2,000 project. It seems to surprise a lot of folks.

The one thing you can do to increase the accuracy is present your vision as accurately as possible. I would hazard a guess that even a mockup drawn on paper can increase the estimation accuracy by about 50%. The better the mockup the smoother the project is going to go and the better the estimate. As a developer, I kiss your feet if you come to me with a site map AND a mockup. You're not doing my work for me, you are letting me know exactly how I can exceed your expectation!

Finally...Estimation is an art, which I am by no means an expert at!!!

The Warriors of Angels and Demons

I changed the stats on the warrior classes within Angels and Demons. Some people might like to know the thought process, other just want to know so they can rule in the game. Either way, here are my thoughts.

Level 1
New Users will need to have some cheap units, so they can build an army quickly and feel properly impressed with the shear volume of warriors they have. I also want to encourage them to build some buildings and get used to the whole research / train/ fight. So for all of that I have created the following:

(Att: 1, Def: 1) Dark Warriors, Holy Soldiers : Starting warriors, a little attack, a little defense, really cheap. Build away

(Att:1, Def: 0) Grimlins, Soldiers: Cannon Fodder, a little attack, no defense. Good to train a bunch of these if you are about to attack.

(Att: 5, Def: 5) Angel, Fallen Angel: Good soldiers, some attack, some defense. These will be your staple warriors until you can advance a few levels. They are not bad and even as you advance you should keep a good bit for defensive purposes.

Level 2
Now at this point in the game, you've attacked a few folks and discovered that while the Angel and Fallen Angel are good for attacking newbies and weak players, they just don't cut it when it comes to a real battle. This is when you begin to pay attention to the actual attack and defense value of your Warriors.

(Att: 10, Def:100) Warlock, Cleric: Your first real warriors. These warriors become available after you have played for about 2 hours. Great defensive warriors and good for attacking.

(Att: 50 Def: 25) Hero, Dark Lord: Your elite attacking squad. It will take about 5 hours for them to become available, they cost a lot but are worth it if you are attacking.

Level 3
So, you've collected a few Holts. Maybe you have opened a Realm Gate. You know how to time your spells and attacks. But there is this one major bad a** who keeps attacking you. You really want to plan something special. An attack of massive proportions, one which can wipe out a whole Holt in one swoop. Now it's time for you to train the big boys.

(Att:150, Def: 50) Arch Angel, Lower Demon: Now your talking, send these guys in and they can wipe out a watch tower by themselves. They do cost a lot of souls.

(Att:300, Def:150) Demon Priest, Demi-God: The strongest unit in the game. By the time you have these guys you should be fighting battles over multiple Holts and Realms. You should only be able to afford a few thousand of these at a time.

5 Ways to Make Your Game Addictive

We all believe that players love to play our games, but what really makes our games addictive. I have found that the following traits tend to relate to the addictiveness of a game. The more your game has the better it will be.

Reason #1: Full Immersion

Players like to be drawn into the story. While most PBBG will not take over the entire screen or have heavy 3d graphics, having a background story and a consistent narrative throughout the game goes a long way to having immersing the player in your game. Be forewarned this is one of the toughest of all of the attributes to implement as it takes a methodical, long term, and strategic builder to maintain a good story line.

Reason #2: Player Ownership

Allow your players to "own" a piece of the game. Ask yourself what aspects of the game play do you allow your players to control. The most common implementations of this are an in game auction site, allowing players to sell items from a shop, or allowing players to swap items or even create them. One of the best games online that allow player ownership is SecondLife. (Yes, I realize it is not really a game)

Reason #3: Personalization

Do you give your players a way to stand out from other players? The more opportunity you give them to stand out the more invested they become in playing the game. Most games have some sort of built in Avatar system, while this does go toward personalization it has been proven that most gamers have become jaded to the avatar and consider it the same as a personal username. Leaving the Avatar system with a lesser impact than it did in past times.

Reason #4: Rare Items/Actions

Having rare items within your game gives the collector within the gamer something to look forward too. The issue with rare items is that often they are "game changers" in that who ever owns one is semi-god like. In truth a rare item that has less power works just as well as a powerful rare item. There are two caveats to keep in mind, first knowledge of its rarity must be will know, and second the item must have a "unique" appearance within the game. For Example: Everyone knows that finding the "Super Secret Rod of Civility" is really hard to get, and if you get one your face glows red. The only way to get a glowing red face is if you have the secret rod.

Reason #5: Showing the Ladder

How easy is it for your players to see their progress in the game? Players like to get that immediate gratification as they rack up the score, so make sure that they can see their name on a scoreboard and see how they progress up it. Even if it does nothing more than point out they they are NOT last on the list (only 2nd to last). This is one that is simple to build but rarely done correctly within PBBGs.

Comments are welcome....

How to make Money with your Game (pbbg)

The eternal question, how to turn this thing into a money tree.

I've got a game coming out with lots of potential, here is my plan to make money from the game. If you have tried any of the following please let me know how it has worked out for you. (And of course if you have any other ideas please shoot them out.
Some of this are summarized from posting and conversations on other sites, so I certainly can not claim these as "mine".

Background: This is an RPG game, utility management game. Let's say a user gets 1 pt every 1 min. They buy stuff and attack other players with it.

Idea 1: User can purchase more action pts/turns/ticks.
The trick with this is that in order to maintain a balanced system, when one user buys pts. All users get points. IE: You are actually bying everyone in the game an extra 500 action points.
Alternativly, you could randomly give the purchaser and 10,20 or 30 other players the same amount of points.

Idea 2: Membership
Two types of Membership, a lifetime or a monthly. While monthly is more attractive to me, lifetime is more attractive to the player.

Membership gives you additional benefits that make the game easier to play. Maybe the ability to have a custom avatar or screen. You are allowed to buy items, units or equipment that functions in the same manner as a non-member item but it has a different image.

Idea 3: Special Items
Allow users to buy items/units/equipment that does special things or have special/higher stats. I go round and round about this one, as it has the potential to devastate the game balance. But everywhere that I read says that while the players grip about this feature, they will buy these items. This also seems to be the starting point where items in your game begin to have an external real world money value.

Idea 4: Earn Refuge
Most games give refuge to new players, they can't be attacked for 24 hours. A player could by refuge and not be attacked for a given number of hours. This has the potential to mess with game balance if a player is able to buy this for extended period of times.

I'd like to hear what your thoughts are about this...

Battle Forces Online: Bounce Rates and Visits

Battle Forces Online: Bounce Rates and Visits

Interesting .... Between Feb 15, 2008 and Mar 14, 2008.

Low Bounce Rates:
* freegames.au - 39 visits, 20% bounce rate
* internetgames.org - 1 visits (prev 7)
* onlinegamesinn.com - 10 visits (prev 19), 30% bounce rate
* pbbgblog - 42 visits, 40% bounce rate
* onrpg.com - 133 visits (prev 37), 27% bounce rate (prev 30%)
* forums.indiegamer.com - 13 visits (prev 97), 30% bounce rate (prev 62%)

Most Visits From
* onrpg.com - 133 visits (prev 37), 27% bounce rate (prev 30%)
* community.bbgamezone.com - 49 visits (prev 59), 35% bounce rate (prev 45%)
* forums.indiegamer.com - 13 visits (prev 97), 30% bounce rate (prev 62%)
* pbbgblog - 42 visits, 40% bounce rate

I know that this past month I have posted a lot of entries on pbbgblog.com....evidently they have been working. The bounce rate is a bit high but it seems worth while.

Mental Note: Check out onrpg.com, it may be worth while to post a few things over there as it seems, they have a great bounce rate for my visitors.

Battle Forces Online: Bounce Rates and Visits

Interesting .... Between Jan 15, 2008 and Feb 15, 2008.

Low Bounce Rates:

• internetgames.org - 7 hits, 15% bounce rate
• onlinegamesinn.com - 19 hits, 27% bounce rate
• pbbblog.com - 7 hits, 29% bounce rate
  
• onrpg.com - 37 hits, 30% bounce rate
• forums.indiegamer.com - 97 hit, 62% bounce rate

Most Visits From

• community.bbgamezone.com - 56 visits, 52% bounce rate
• forums.indiegamer.com - 97 hit, 62% bounce rate
• onrpg.com - 37 hits, 30% bounce rate

Conversions...

Why won't they Play my Game?

I've been researching how to convert users for my browser based game Battle Forces Online. Well the first thing I had to do was to deiced what a "conversion" meant. After much labor and hard thought (30 to 40 seconds) I came to the brilliant conclusion that there are 3 different things I want from players.

Players
I want players to hit my landing page and start playing the game. I consider a user who creates an account and adds a Blade to the battle field. I consider these my players.

Voters
In order to generate more players, I need players to vote on one or more listing sites. This seems to drive more users then any other action that I can do. This is a sort of secondary conversion as this can not be done by a user, but can be done by a player (person with an account).

Buyers
The hardest sell. There is/will be an upgrade feature which will allow players to purchase items within the game. A conversion would be getting a player to buy this item.

In my next post, I will follow up with how I can make modifications to my landing page to facilitate these conversions.

So How can I optimize the Landing Page

Large Images
Large images placed in the center of the page that contrast with the background draw the eye. Currently I have a large image that spans 75% of the landing page, I am going to restrucutre this to have the "Play Now" button in the middle of the page.

Contact Information
Potential players are much more comfortable when they know they can contact the developer or support team for the game. Since this is the case, I will add a send message form where users can send me a message and I get it via email.

Screenshots
Potential players love screenshots as do reviewers. I have screenshots on the page so I will keep them, however I must remember to not let them overshadow the "Play Now" button.

Registering
Registration should be as simple and as accessible as possible. I think I will add both a login and a register form to the entrance page.

Headline
Users will read the first headline on your page 90% of the time...what is mine?

Tracking
In order to test these changes, I plan on creating a folder called "Landing", I will then figure out which of the landing pages convert the best.

KISS
Keep it as simple as possible, classy but simple.

Interesting Items to Follow Up With:

• How to convert players to payers

First Day in the Advertising Park

As I said before, I setup my google adwords yesterday. Here's some interesting information on that effort:

Active Keywords

The following keywords were used, the cents represent how much I paid per click.

Date	Keyword	CPC	Imp.	Clicks	CTR	Avg CPC	Cost	Position
11/26/2007	free online multiplayer rpg games	$0.10	122	4	3.28%	$0.22	$0.87	3.4
11/26/2007	good strategy games	$0.05	1	0	0.00%	$0.00	$0.00	4
11/26/2007	play rpg games	$0.05	149	4	2.68%	$0.16	$0.66	4.1
11/26/2007	strategy game	$0.10	518	9	1.74%	$0.21	$1.89	3.6

"free online multiplayer rpg games" was interesting because I could not set it lower then $0.10 per click.

57% Came and Left

43% continued to play the game.

62% used Firefox

53% used IE

They visited 4.5 pages per visit. (There is about 6 pages total)

My Mistake with Google Adwords

I decided to try out google adwords and actually pay to get some visitors to the site. Here is a brief synopsis.

Setting Up

In case you have not tried this, in general the steps to setting up google ads is as follows

• Create a google account
• Create a "Campaign" ("Battle Forces Online")
• Create an "Ad Group"
• Create an "Ad" (see below)
• Create Keywords
• Set your keyword price
• Set your google network price (this was my mistake)
• Give Google some money, so they can give money to advertisers.
  

My Ads

I made two ads, they are both equally effective at this point.

Battle Forces Online
Tactical turn based strategy game
Fight, Battle and Play now
www.BattleForcesOnline.com

Online RPG
Tactical turn based strategy game
Fight, Battle and Play now
www.BattleForcesOnline.com

My Mistake

I did not realize or the default Cost per Click for the Google Network was set at .20. When I let my ads go live, I racked up about $50.00 in an hour. The good news is I got 70,000 impressions and 100+ visitors.

I have since turned off Google Ads, My goal today is to re-evaluate my keywords.

Caveat

Be aware of the fact that it takes about 3 hours for the results of your ads, (and how much money you spent) is updated in the Google Admin Control panel. This was part of my issue as well.

In your history log most of the refers from adwords will be labels as pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Marketing and Stats

So it's been a few days since I posted on the forums. I went on family vacation for Thanksgiving so I've not been able to stay on the game and help people play. (That was a bad timing issue on my part)

Anyway, the day of the post I got 100+ visitors, next day 35, and yesterday 15. This goes much as I expected as I figured that as time passed my posting would drop to the bottom of the forums.

My game allows a person to play as a Guest without registering, so it's hard for me to tell how many new players have signed up, however here are some stats:

Number of Players: 31
Number of Guests: 25
Humm, doesn't help a lot. Does it.

The other interesting items to note are that the following sites give me the most referrals:
48 - forums.indiegamer.com
14 - devmasters.net
14 - gianttip.com
12 - bbgamezone.com
12 - gameproducer.net

My next attempt at marketing will be to put the game on some list but first I have to push an update.