09/12/1998 Tim Joyce, tim@hoop.co.uk
This had been written is based on a telephone conversation between Afam Edozie and and Tim Joyce of HOOP on 08/12/1998 and the guide book "London for Less" supplied by Afam. It is designed to set out the tasks and costs estimates for creating a website for London for Less, a leading UK guide book. Initially the site will only cover the London for Less guide book, but it is envisaged that it will be extended to cover all of Metropolis' guide books (covering about 18 major cities around the world).
The graphics look of the site will follow the design for the guidebook, with a clean and consistent look, and plenty of color photographs.
The home page will display the menu, and an introduction to the Guide with links straight into the various sections. The menu will contain links to the content pages.
Much thought has obviously gone into making the guide easy to read and accessible. There is no compelling argument why the website data cannot be organized in exactly the same way.
The guide will therefor breakdown into the following sections:
Each item will break down into it's subsections.
Template pages will be supplied so that London for Less staff can easily transfer the information into the web pages from their PageMaker files.
Map will use an interactive service such as http://uk.multimap.com/map/places.cgi.
This will provide a full text search for the entire site. It will use a commercially available search engine like Altavista.
The website is a great place to get feedback about the guide. A form will be written that will allow users to simply provide comments for inclusion in the next publication.
Tourists visiting London are an identifiable community, and therefor may well benefit from their own 'community space', a messageboard is a great place to get people to interact, and to keep them coming back.
This page will list links to online resources that may be valuable to London for Less. It can also be used to exchange links with appropriate partners as part of London for Less's online promotion. This is very important as many of the search engines sort their results based on the number of links a web site has to it. Therefor, the more the better.
The data in the London for Less book is well organized, and it is easy to see how a successful web site can be produced without too much trouble. We have considered putting the data into a database, but feel that as it is largely text, there would not be a significant benefit in doing this.
We suggest that the pages are built as flat, linked html files, and a site specific search engine applied. This will allow user to search for say "crown jewels" and find the Tower of London. The other advantage of flat files over databases is that Internet search engines will spider all of the content, giving the site a significant boost up the search engines.
HOOP will provide London for Less with a number of template HTML files. This will allow London for Less staff to easily create the html content pages. We will also provide expertise and advice linking the pages together.
We suggest that London for Less use a HTML editor such as Dreamweaver in order to build the content pages for the site. In order to manipulate the pictures for the site, London for Less staff should be a little familiar will a photo editor such as PaintShopPro.
London for Less will need to purchase a "virtual server" in order to host their site. They will also need email facilities. All of this can be provided through I-way.
Marketing for Technology will supply promotions services.
It is anticipated that the majority of maintenance will be undertaken by London for Less staff, and therefor no maintenance contract needs to be signed. Maintenance tasks that require outsourcing will be quoted for on an as-required basis.
These estimates are given for guidance only.
| Task | Estimate (hours) |
| Pre sales consultancy, and preparation of proposal | 3 |
| Graphical Design | 20 |
| Build of Skeleton | 10 |
| Build of Template pages | 20 |
| Linking of Content together | 10 |
| Search | 15 |
| Feedback | 5 |
| Messageboard | 15 |
| Interactive Maps | 15 |
| Links | 3 |
| Review of Site and sign-off | 10 |
| Peer Review | 13 |
| Site Launch | 5 |
| Total | 144 |
The site will be built and launched for a fixed cost of £5750.00. Alternatively, HOOP designers and programmers can be contracted by the hour @ £40.
Multimaps are delivered under the following pricing mechanism:
Internal development and public demos: no charge.
Low-volume maps within web pages: £30/thousand map deliveries.
Advance purchase of 500,000 map deliveries: £10/thousand (ie. £5,000)
Advance purchase of 200,000 map deliveries: £15/thousand (ie. £3,000)
Advance purchase of 100,000 map deliveries: £20/thousand (ie. £2,000)
Advance purchase of 50,000 map deliveries: £22/thousand (ie. £1,100)
Advance purchase of 20,000 map deliveries: £25/thousand (ie. £500)