How long does it take for you to build a website with PW?

[Boost]

Hei,

Just to make sure my expectations are correct. For a "normal" institutional website that includes static pages and a blog. How long does it take you to create it?

Cheers

[Stefanowitsch]

Well, what is "normal" nowadays? It totally depends on the amount of static pages, the features - and the design (+ custom desktop/tablet/mobile adaptations)

Do you start from scratch with a blank processwire installation or did you build yourself a custom development project with a default stylesheet and all kinds of modules, fields and templates predefined (tools you would need in every project) so you can just grab what you need and just alter the layout and data you render?

Last but not least it also depends on your skill level as a developer of course.

So based on all this I guess someone could either spend 10 or 100+ hours on a project.

[Craig]

Sites like that with a small amount of content and low variety in page templates/designs are typically 10-20 hours for me.

[wbmnfktr]

Woah... there are a lot of moving parts here.

First of all:
It always takes way longer than anyone expected it would take.

I have seen super simple and minimal projects taking weeks instead of days.
Yet I've seen quite large and complex projects that took only a few weeks instead of months.

In average the PHP/PW part is most of the time the smallest part within a project that's just dealing with content at least in my projects.
It can be tricky when you have to deal with lots of data from different sources, especially when you do more than just displaying that data.

Most time and energy in my projects go into:

• Planning out the whole project
• Designing each and every bit
• Content audit, creation, and optimisation
• Frontendwork HTML, CSS, JS

Right after that ProcessWire comes into play with these parts:

• Templates and fields
• Site structure, setting up basic pages
• Modules and global settings
• Backend logic, data automation, cron/lazycron jobs, automated maintenance

On average I'd say it's a 70/30 ratio between those two.

To get you some numbers here:
We talk about at least a few weeks and maybe even months in total with all kinds of related things like meetings, phone calls, organizing, setting up Google and other tools, like tracking tools, newsletter, etc.

To make things clear and a bit more transparent, we talk about projects and websites like these:

• https://www.restaurant-blechnapf.de/
• https://www.klippo-nms.de/
• https://www.musikschule-neumuenster.de/

In comparison to the above there are projects I built in my spare time without a lot of planning or almost anything - which took a few hours or maybe two days in total. Like these:

• https://www.jet-fire.de/
• https://www.voss-friseure.de/

The main difference is that the first 3 projects are totally custom and fully optimized, multiple user accounts, access rights, automation and maintenance and design-wise on a totally different level. While the last two use UIKIT or Bootstrap, just display simple content and aren't that well optimized to be honest.

Last but not least there are projects like this:

• https://www.restaurants-neumuenster.de/

It started with a simple splash page, a simlpe form and a bit of content and went online within a few hours. Yet as of today there are several hundred hours of work in it. Quite a bit design (had a few relaunches in the past) but way more in terms of data processing, automation, newsletters and lot's of nice things.

 

TL;DR

From about 2 days to a couple of months.

[Boost]

Thanks all.