I've been offered pay to update a companies website, need advice

Hello fellow coders!

TL;DR: A Costa Rican construction company wants to upgrade/modernise their website to include a bunch of features like live chat, automated responses and more interactivity, including an application that can take client requests and produce standardised quotations. This is almost certainly over my current level of expertise, but I’d like to know by how much, and if through using Wordpress and its ecosystem of tools/widgets I can reduce the coding expertise requirements to a level I can manage (for reference, I’m on the JS section of the course)

Taking the above into account, I have a few questions

  • What Wordpress-plugins/tools/languages would you recommend to implement something like this
  • What considerations would you recommend I take into account
  • Are there any articles/posts on admin/doc control for one off jobs like this or contract based developers?
  • I’ve little idea how to price something like this, other than on an hourly basis excluding all project/client expenses. Any and all advice on this appreciated
  • How much time should I allow for a project of this scale? The client isn’t particularly pressed for time, so this is flexible.

This is all assuming the following:

  • Graphic design work (images, logos) will be done by graphic designers
  • Content provided by the company
  • I will be needing to deal with documentation and maintenance

Any and all advice appreciated

Thanks in advance

Don :slight_smile:

First I want to say I’m not a wordpress developer, and only have a vague idea of what it as a platform can do. I usually build web applications with a wide range of requirements.

include a bunch of features like live chat, automated responses and more interactivity, including an application that can take client requests and produce standardised quotations.

So these few features sound pretty advanced, and idk if wordpress could help you here much. If you had to do this from scratch, your looking at a pretty complex system. Even if you offload some of the features into secondary services to simplify how much work you have, its still rather complex. Even if wordpress could help, I still think you’ll need to be aware of how to add more complex functionality to that system, as I doubt you can get all of the features done “out of the box” with minimal knowledge or work.

This also assumes the requirements you state are the only requirements, and they aren’t going to change. (Which almost never happens ;D)

I unfortunately have minimal experience with freelancing so I couldn’t help with the pricing/contracting part.

Finally if your just starting with the JS course you might have a tough time covering all the requirements, wordpress or not. So this might be beyond what your currently comfortable with, but that could be up to debase if you have existing knowledge of other tooling.

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Hi @bradtaniguchi

Thank you for your advice! Very much appreciated :slight_smile:

This makes a lot of sense, I’ve managed to find some tools on Wordpress that provide chat functionality, but as for automated responses and standardised quotations, this is still vague and likely won’t meet all my needs; not to mention these companies are English based, making client handover a nightmare.

Past experience as a HVAC consultant has taught me this principle very well :laughing:

Appreciate your honest feedback, I’m going to consider my options over the next couple of days and see what other options there are.

Thanks again for your help :slight_smile:

Don

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