A Full-Blown Publication Web Site for Under $1000
I’m a Foodie. I love food, am totally in to Food Network (they have a great web site, BTW) and I’m not a half-bad cook either. My specialty is a Julia Child recipe for chicken with a wine, herb, and beef stock reduction. One show I particularly like is “$40 A Day” where Rachel Ray visits tourist locations and has only $40 to spend. The challenge is to see if she can eat at great places, but spend only $40 and stay within her budget. So in that same spirit, I’m going to throw out my own challenge: can I build a full-featured publication web site for under $1000?
It sounds simple enough … after all there are a ton of open source content management systems out there. The best resource for evaluating them is www.opensourcecms.com. It lists all major open source CMS’s along with reviews and the ability to you to actually test drive both the front end user experiences and the back end administrative interfaces. But there really is no silver bullet when it comes to a content management system. I’ve personally used many of them … Mambo, e107, PHP Nuke, DotNetNuke, Typo3, WordPress, vBulletin, and phpBB just to name a few. What I’ve found is that they all do some things well and some not so well. IMHO, vBulletin is the absolute best discussion forum out there with the most capabilities, features, and administrative options. For example, with a couple add-ons, you could actually use vBulletin as the basis for your entire site (maybe I’ll talk about that in a future post). But it would be limiting in other ways. Other CMS’s do a good job of content management, but aren’t as good at blogs as WordPress or discussion forums as vBulletin.
Sure, the ultimate wish-list for a CMS would be a single application where a team could manage all different kinds of content from a single database, manage all aspects of reader management from a single database, and be replicable to multiple sites with easy upgrade paths. Many CMS’s claim they can do this, but the reality is that they all have their limitations and costs. It depends on where you are in your publishing needs, but my opinion is that you shouldn’t try to find a one-size-fits-all CMS. It’s like trying to find the ultimate CRM package. Companies have spent millions trying to come up with the silver-bullet application that does anything. Whether it be a CMS or a CRM package, what you wind up with is a very expensive monolithic application that does a lot of things OK, but not many of them really well. Instead of trying to find one CMS that does everything for you, look at the specific needs of the web site you are trying to build. Find the best tools for the job and get it to market quickly and efficiently.
Back to my challenge. To prove it can be done, I want to launch a full-blown publication web site here on emedia strategist within 30 days and for less than $1000. I’m not going to shortcut it by just throwing up a single open source CMS package and calling it good. Instead, I’m going to really look for the best applications for the various pieces of the site. Here are the capabilities that I want for my specific business requirements:
- Blogging - Gotta keep the ol’ blog going!
- Discussion forum – Almost positive this will be vBulletin, but I may surprise myself.
- Directory – I can’t find a good directory of eMedia products and service providers, so I want to start one. Oh, did I mention that I want eCommerce on this so that people can purchase upgraded listings?
- Event calendar – No brainer for most publications, but I’ve seen some really atrocious calendar implementations out there.
- Vertical search – I have a vertical search of emedia web sites through Rollyo, but I want a better implementation and integration with my site.
- Site search – This is a must have for any site worth its salt.
- Single user registration – I want to keep all of my user registration and profile data in one database.
- Metrics – Need to have very good metrics across the entire site. Preferably the metric will be tied in so I can also see RSS feed performance, traffic from email promotions, and SEO/SEM efforts.
- Advertising - Gotta have a way to place and manage ads on the site. Needs to support all major ad types.
- Email – Need a good email service provider preferably integrated with my user registration system.
- RSS – Must manage my RSS feeds effectively and support all major RSS formats.
- Good design – I want a professional design that integrates my logo and that I can carry across all aspects of my site.
So can I do it? Can I launch a full-blown publication web site in 30 days and for less than $1000? Or will this be “Web Site: Impossible” …
13 Responses to “ “A Full-Blown Publication Web Site for Under $1000”
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Not only is this POSSIBLE, but I think it’s pretty darn straightforward.
I’d look to Drupal for the core. It’s got the cleanest infrastructure, which means getting it to play nicely with other apps is pretty easy. (It even publishes services so you can decentralize login/authorization.)
Unlike PHP-Nuke, Mambo, etc…, Drupal does a GREAT job with user access and authentication, which is key, plus it makes it easy to change layouts/views of different content.
The out of the box Drupal install can handle forums (there’s some nice skins to make the forums look and feel like PHP-BB, rather than the crappy Drupal default forums), blog/editorial, and RSS. Various plug-ins can provide email (or use Feedburner to do email based on content published thru a feed), ads (most of the major vendors are supported), and event calendars.
Not sure about directories. Probably do-able, but I haven’t looked into it. E-commerce is also something of a black hole, but should be do-able with a little extra code.
Metrics can get pushed through Google Analytics easily enough from any site. If you burn your RSS, FeedBurner can provide the rest.
I love this idea Eric, its kind of like “survivor” or “Amazing Race!” Why don’t you set up a webcam in your office so we can track your progress . . day by day . . .
Nik, I’ve had a couple other folks suggest Drupal as well. I’ve also had the suggestion to look at Plone which is built on the Zope platform which is Python based. I’m not a programmer, but I can hack my way through PHP. Not sure about Python though. But for my challenge, I don’t want to rely upon programming … just integration and customization. Should be fun to see what wins out!
Great idea, David. I used to have a webcam running from my office and posted to Shanfelt.com but haven’t been running it since June. When I get back from the city, I’ll fire it back up.
I’m with Nik, should be very doable with $1,000 – it’s the time-frame that could be tough. When you’ve loaded up all the components, check out http://www.templatemonster.com for some cool pre-built themes – you can buy them outright or just grab a licence for $50 – I have a cool one running on my UtahSaint site – http://www.utahsaint.com & at my other site – http://www.blacktiemedia.com
On the surface I agree too. But I’m going to try and take as realistic a look at this as possible. I’m going to track hard costs (software), developer time if needed (and assign a cost per hour), design costs, and even hosting costs. And I may need to integrate multiple applications together to form a full-featured publication web site. Costs could begin to add up quickly. I’ll post updates as I progress.
One way to do this is to outsource to India or eastern europe or Russia. I’ve not had the guts to risk this, but one of our customers has a guy in eastern europe that cranks out full-blown CMS sites for $800. Back here on the planet earth, to do this challenge with a U.S. developer that charges, say, $100/hr, means you have 10 development hours to work with. Total. Some developers I’ve worked with charge $150/hr. I just don’t see how it’s possible. But good luck! I’ll be interested to watch!
But what will Mrs. Shanfelt say? Won’t she miss you?
Sounds like a cool challenge. Good luck! I’m looking forward to the progress you make.
Has the clock started ticking?
Hi Eric,
I’m quite sure you can do this. Many of the things you want will turn out to be easier than you would expect.
For example, for vertical search, try Google Custom Search, which is built on the old Google Co-op. For a directory, take a look at the supplier directory at SourceTool.com. I’m told it was built with Joomla.
Drupal is a great choice for a CMS — particularly for forums, etc. But don’t overlook WordPress. It’s the easiest publishing system on earth. And at least one top-tier magazine site runs on it. Check out XXL Magazine at xxlmag.com.
And pay attention to Bricolage. It’s not as popular as it once was. And the support network has faded away. But most of the sites over at Prism Business were built with a version of it.
Good luck!
LOL … great minds think alike, Paul. I have a co-op setup with Google already. Would love to have you as a contributor. Prescott is going to contribute as well and so is Jason Brown, another emedia guru. I’ll send you an invite and plan to incorporate that into my new $1K site. And yes, the clock has started ticking … I’ll put up a countdown clock on my home page and post an update on the progress this weekend.
I agree with several of the posters here. Drupal offers quite a bit of functionality and I’ve been impressed in the last few months with the sheer scope of the modules that have been developed by the open source community around it. You can tie-in the features of VBulletin into it, and my experience with Google’s Custom Search so far has been very good. The ease at which you can upload categorized URLs, allow easy “sub searching” within those categories and ability to embed it within your site make it ideal as a custom niche vertical application. And that is still relatively early in the life cycle at Google, so one can only expect the ability to customize it further down the road with improved APIs is pretty solid. I’d be interested in participating in this as well. I’ve been toying around with alot of these programs in the past few months and when you think about the significant dollar investments companies have made over the years in CMS systems, these new ‘free’ technologies really open your eyes to what is possible in the future. Also worth noting that The Onion uses Drupal, so clearly its easy enough to customize for a major, popular platform. For statistics, I’d also recommend Google Analytics. Like most programs, you can also integrate that using modules in Drupal for more advanced customization of the data that comes in. And of course, its free which is even better. Some other features I like in Drupal are ease of including incoming RSS feeds either as aggregator items specifically or individual stories when the content comes in full format. This would especially be useful when pulling in content from third parties like AP, Lexis and Yellowbrix if sites use those services. The user registration components are also a great option with various modules to tie-in other third party sites and applications.
[...] I can’t give myself any more extensions and still feel good about this challenge. The reality is that I’ve just simply been travelling too much recently (every week for the past 7 weeks) and trying to finish off strong here at Penton to give my own site much attention. I’ve had maybe 4-5 hours total to spend on my own site since I began this challenge. I guess it’s kind of like a mechanic who spends so much time working on other people’s cars that his own car gets neglected. [...]
[...] A while back I wrote a post claiming I could launch a full-blown publishing web site in 30 days and for under $1K of hard cost to me. I got too busy with my consulting business and never got around to actually doing it. I’m not complaining as I was doing really well as a consultant, but it still gets under my skin that I never did it. [...]