I'm starting a futures IB/CTA. I need a slick, multi page site like these . http://www.slipkatrading.com/ http://www.striker.com/E1201_textnav.php How much should these cost?
hedgeco out of west palm beach has a service where they sell customized pages to hf managers, i believe the most basic webpage is 2.5k http://www.hedgecowebsites.com/
My cousin has paid ~$25k for a capital management site, logo design. That was about 5 years ago & in Moscow. I think you will find very different quotations, as it would depend on who is quoting. You can get a student do it for a ~$1k I suppose.
Plenty of good designs at: www.templatemonster.com Search templates with keyword = 'invest' http://www.templatemonster.com/category.php?from=6&search_words=invest Fill the template with photos from http://www.stockphoto.com/ Have the logo done at: http://thelogocompany.net/ If you have no money at all: open source web design www.oswd.org If you have a little money in the web design budget: Get the idea of what you want from the above sites and then post a 'project description' on http://www.elance.com/ Please! Not another butt-ugly IB/CTA web site!!!!
Good luck with your venture. IMO, I would aim a lot higher than the first site you linked to. It is out of date and not that slick at all, but that's my personal opinion. It only has a few pages on it really, excluding the quotes and research pages which are themselves simple dynamic pages using external data sources. I would not pay more than $300 for a clone of that site as long as you have prepared and organised your content very well and aren't requiring much bespoke design work. As for the second site, it's a lot more comprehensive, but still nothing major there. It's mostly structured content, 2 levels deep. If you use one of the latest incarnations of PHP content management software such as drupal.org you should be able to keep costs down. It mostly boils down to what content you want to have on your site, how you want to organize it and what kind of special interactivity or functionality do you need. The Striker site has an option to present content in Japanese for example. A decent content management system would cater for this out of the box but still requires planning for upfront when implementing the site. The design of that site leaves a lot to be desired - but that's just my opinion again. You may consider picking a template from www.templatemonster.com for example and then post the job on www.elance.com The more detailed requirements you can specify the better. I personally can't stress the importance of preparing the actual content you want on the site as soon as possible - down to the last word. Once again, good luck with this.
Pabst I do not know what kind of individual you are. But I have found working with designers difficult because I am always striving to improve lead capture rates. I am not sure if you are hoping to capture leads off the web but if you are you may need more than a pretty site. If you are going to advertise know that there may be a huge difference in performance between a lead capture page and the home page of a site that does the usual info dump on the reader. Also know that you need to be able to alter your site at will. The last thing you want to do is have to go to the desiger every time you want to update something. I recently learned the expensive lesson that I need to have the designers design something in front page. so I can make changes without waiting for them. If you wish to do well in the search engines that is another story.
You make your own for free. No charge. Google has a free webpage maker that is very simple to use. It will take you about 1 hour to figure it out completely. You need a gmail account which is also free from google. Then after you get your website the way you like it, then you can buy a domain name and put it onto your google page through your domain name register, so the google page will be your own website address such as www.yourwebsitename.com It cost like $5.00 year to register a domain name from www.godaddy.com So the most you will invest is $5.00 year. that's it. If you don't your website name after a year, then you don't renew, if you want to keep it, then you give them another $5.00. But you always will have your free google page unless you cancel it. I can help you with this if you like. You can put video's and all kind of stuff in there. Anything really. They have templates also. And best of all. It is free. If you go to the template pages, then you will notice that some of the templates look very familiar to the already published websites that people claim they paid 2K for. But they really made it themselves for free. Go check it out. http://pages.google.com/-/about.html I'll help you make it for free. Websites are fairly simple to make. Message me if you want to and I'll help you make it.
It's about ROI, not how flashy the site is IMHO, look at this poo-poo http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
He's right. Flashy websites are a waste of money. People don't care about big colorful websites. They care about good service. Usually the more flashy the website, that means the worse the service.