WordPress for R40 million?

Breakdown & Analysis:
Let me explain how I did this breakdown analysis and what I want to achieve.

First. What do I want to achieve?

In a Nutshell

In a nutshell, I want to establish how many pages & files this site contains and then also differentiate between the different types of pages & files.

To give a simple explanation – when we design a website for customers the final product could contain a possible 100 pages & files.

But this could be misleading. As we literally only created about 40 – 60 of these pages & files.

Let us say the customer provides us with pictures of their head office and staff members or products.

They can account for about 5 – 10 files in a small project. A larger project may be up to the hundreds to thousands.

Original WordPress Content? No!

Those are not our original content. They are provided to us and we simply have to attach it to a page which takes very little to no time.

Same with PDF, DOC and Excel files. In most cases, they are provided by the customer.

I am hoping to give us all a better idea of what the “COST PER PAGE” was for this website.

How much will a web developer charge you to write a one-pager article?

And remember in most cases EVEN the content are provided.

Copy and Paste – Expensive Skillset?

It is merely a matter of COPY & PASTE and just do the alignment & styling. But lets say you do not have those skills. Well for this exercise add 50% to your bill and hire someone with the relevant skills. 50% could be steep but hey this is just a R 40 million website. You will have more than enough to dish out 🙂

Here is How I did my Analysis:

1. I did a “website crawl” of the entire domain. This gave me ALL possible URLs (pages & files | inbound & outbound) that exist.

2. Doing a filter on the URL’s as accurate as possible to distinguish between Content Pages, PDF, Images, CSS, Javascript.

To better understand why:

• Content Pages: (HTML, SHTML, PHP etc) These are the readable pages. They contain content and this is mostly what a user will be reading or browsing
• PDF, XLS, DOC: These documents are mostly provided and to embed them on a website takes about ZERO time. Exceptions could apply. But this is merely a link to a PDF file or whatever. And I assume that the PDF files must have been provided by the Free State Government.
• Images: Usually the majority of images (if not all) are also provided by the customer (Free State Government). Except for design & logo related files (images) for the website. Usually one logo and a few additional image files for the rest of the template (background etc)
• CSS: The cascading style sheet files are responsible for the styling of the site. The user never interacts with these files nor do the user ever view these files directly. They are background files. When working with Joomla or WordPress as a framework, the framework creates a host of these files automatically. With no or little user intervention. For your own styling of the website, you will probably create a couple of CSS files. I said a couple! Not 100, not 50, not 25. Maybe 1- 5.
• Javascript: Nearly the same as the CSS file type although it serves a totally different purpose. This is a file that works in the background. Javascript is a scripting programming language. Joomla and WordPress also create several of them automatically.

The Results of my “WordPress website crawl”

(all calculations based on the R40 million and not the original R140 million…)

*** This is likely the one I would trust as an estimate.

Want to do your Own Analysis. Grab the file here

BTW: If you would like to conduct your own breakdown or analysis please be welcome to use my web crawl results (in Excel format).

Download here: Free State Website Crawl Results

Your comments & feedback are most welcome: info@programmer.co.za

Final Note:

Let’s say ALL my assumptions are totally incorrect. I will accept 🙂
Then we still have to agree with my first calculation of R19,120.46 per page or file.

This very same website you are browsing now (Programmer.co.za) will cost:
R1, 663, 480.02. Any buyers out there?

To put it even more in perspective.

You want to set up a website for your company which will include the following pages:

Home, Products, Contact Us, About us.
That is 4 actual pages.

Now let’s add: 1 CSS and 2 Javascript files.
Oooh and wait – you have 10 images of your products as well.

And wait – you have 2 outbound links to a wikipedia page.

Okay this is the development cost according to Free State Provincial Government:

Content Pages: 4
CSS File: 1
Javascript File: 2
Product Images: 10
Logo Image File: 1
Outbound Links: 2
Total Files: 20

Total Cost to Develop: 20 X R19,120.46 = R382,409.20

Please oooh please !!!!

We develop websites like that for under R10,000.00 with professional logo design work included…

Ooh – I created this article page & 2 images in just under 2 hours. That is nearly R60,000.00.