Extreme newbie here, grateful to have found you and with a question:

[DRPS05]

I've been told that a website feature I inquired about requires custom coding and is worth $20k. I don't have a clue about such things, but there is so much available off-the-shelf these days that I find this hard to believe. I'm not the programmer (duh, right?)...lol...but the potential customer, and am trying to educate myself about this feature.

The feature is very similar to craigslist.

People can click on their state on an image of the US map, then they go to a page with an image of their state and can then choose from several major cities to find the area closest to them.

This takes them to a "list" page where they can post things they need and things they have to offer (there's more to it, but that's the gist of the feature).

Now, inserting a "search" feature, with indexing, is supposedly where this becomes so complicated? I know nothing about indexing, so this is lost on me.

I know there are scripts to insert the "zip code finder" and ways of finding something in or close to your zip code, but I was interested in something a bit more utilitarian than that. For example, I may live in NY but am curious what is available in Dallas, but don't know a zip code there. The map makes this much easier. Just click the state and go from there.

The other thing which concerns me about customization is that it can't easily be transferred from the current host. They said it would require paying someone to translate php.

There is no way I could remotely come up with that kind of money...not even close...so this isn't even a possibility if indeed it DOES truly cost that much for such a program, but I'm very curious as to the validity of what I'm being told.

Many thanks in advance for enlightening me. It is truly appreciated.

 

[latamesh]

I would definitely continue to shop around. I would never select a webhost that insist on hanging on to proprietary programming! You pay for it, you own it, period.

Have you considered using elance or other programmers?

Have you looked into big name CMS like Joomla or Drupal?

 

[DRPS05]

Thank you.

The developers are good friends of my business partner. So, it's a little awkward. I've never needed a website with a custom feature, so this is new territory.

If we continue to work with them, we would "own" the custom coding, but wouldn't be able to do anything with it without hiring other help, should we transfer away from their hosting. This is probably logical on one hand, yet on another it just doesn't feel right.

So, the feature I describe, there aren't existing scripts out there to your knowledge, which could be tweaked, for such a feature? It would indeed require rather intense custom coding, even if not $20k worth?

Thanks again.

 

[kmote]

Something like this certainly doesn't sound like $20k worth of coding to me.

 

[CrazeD]

Something like this certainly doesn't sound like $20k worth of coding to me.

I definitely agree.

An experienced PHP programmer could probably whip this up in a week or two and maybe charge $1-2000.

 

[Dr.House]

I definitely agree.

An experienced PHP programmer could probably whip this up in a week or two and maybe charge $1-2000.

Being an experienced programmer of several years and HTML coder for many years, I can say that the feature of the map clicking is a simple DHTML trick (if you use Dreamweaver you should be able to do it in an hour or so).
And the listings is just a database thing, less than a half hour, at most, usually I keep base code for that laying around.

I would charge about the same, maybe a little more. Either way 20K or higher is an absurd amount, you are being cheated.