• daxx
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Topic: A challenge - not for the weak hearted!

$AUD5000? Website Design Scope of required Functionality

My Client is looking to have a website created for the production of high quality user customisable greeting cards.

The user experience would start by them selecting a blank or stock card from a list of categories. On presentation of the card the user should be able to upload an image a background and preferred text.

Essentially customising a card, as much, or as little as preferred.

Although written in aspx, www.moonpig.com.au has a reasonable feel and look to the editing area (mainly javascript)


To this end there would also need to be an admin area where my client could upload card designs submitted by artists, maintain the database, users, templates, polls, news, banners, forums, reports etc. (Much the same as CMS’ like Mambo, Joomla, osCommerce, phpshop and the like.)

Essential Items:
•   Calender/Diary (users should be able to store events in their calendar and have preselected card designs automatically processed at a specified time and date.
•   Image Upload (and resize/rotate/crop)
•   Cards should edit freely and live without the need for a refresh (except in the case of an image upload)
•   Database Integration – users should have the ability to create or upload an address book
•   Choice of dispatch date
•   Preferred recipient address
•   Card ID tracking and reporting
•   Donation Tracker (the user can elect to have a small donation made to their favourite charity)
•   Shopping Cart


Preferred programming method:
PHP and MySQL

End Result:
This is the tricky bit. Orders need to be ported/queued to a professional print station for immediate print and dispatch. The printer ultimately would be the Xerox 6060 but initially may be a smaller docucolor (Xerox). A server can be set up to service this machine.

PDF is the preferred output method for printing, so document/page would need to be converted to PDF before being sent to the server/printer.

Project Timeframe:   6 weeks + debugging

Please submit expressions of interest to stikystuf@yahoo.com.au by October 16 2005

Rocks and Hard Places

Re: A challenge - not for the weak hearted!

You're joking right?

You must be out of your mind if you think you will get that website for $5k Australian.

I have some of your required specialised skills - a website like that usually gets done by more then one person, so I'd work as part of a team of 2 or 3  - but I wouldn't even bother writing you an e-mail for $833 per week you're offering. (Actually far less in real terms - this website will probably take longer then 6 weeks and there is also the issue of tax).

If you're basing your offer on the cheap rates offered by Indian companies, just remember their charges are in USD, they take twice as long to do the job and at least 24 hours to reply to any query, because irrespective of what they claim, they are actually working on several sites at once.
Further in my experience of viewing their 'work' one doesn't have to go far to find bugs and mistakes.
In short - you will not find 'cost economy' in India short of going over there and running the sweatshop yourself.
They may become a serious competitor at some point, but that point isn't yet.

I also think you don't know what you're talking about. It is possible to send print jobs from a website / PHP back end straight to a printer (I currently do that on one of my websites) but the format is not PDF.
I have not seen any printer that accepts PDF as an input format, not even my current model Brother colour laser printer can do that.

Michael Hallager
Auckland, New Zealand

Last edited by michael (2007-04-09 23:23:23)