Web applications is a topic I like a lot. I have personally developed a couple of them, and I’m always having ideas for new web applications. And if you are into making money online surely you also know that web applications is a very attractive way to do it so maybe you have wondered how to create one and what are the times and costs involved.

Well, let me tell you web application’s creation is a very exciting process, but the path from dreaming features to watching a finished product on your browser is not easy, and it’s even harder if you are not of the technical type specially when trying to assess all the resources to make your vision reality. So to solve those kind of doubts I have written this [mini]guide that will give you a path through the entire creation process and some estimates of the costs involved.

1. Develop your vision

OK, first things first, and the first thing is that you need some idea. And it must be good. I know I said this a non technical guide to web application development, but something that will be very useful for you when trying to come with some idea for a new web application is knowing the state of the art of web development.

Two years ago the web development community exploded when the AJAX term was coined. But, hello! AJAX is the past now, even my grandma knows about it. The next big thing will come from the hand of tools and environments like Flex, the Windows Presentation Foundation or Firefox 3, which will allow a web application to access files in your computer. Also, in the next years, internet connections will just get faster and that will help for new advances on web apps development.

Well, a good thing to do while developing your vision is to write a document where you specify all the features and also basic graphical schemes where you explain how do you think the interface must be deployed. Then you pass this document to your designer and developers and the work starts

Time: It depends on you, but a month to get your idea polished is a safe guess. Please consider this is just the idea for your new web app, I’m not talking about developing a business model or something like that.

Cost: This is free as in free of charge, but it requires your time and it costs money.

2. Legal

Yup, you have to create contracts for your [freelance] employers and you have to provide your visitors with Privacy Policy and Terms of Service docs. Now, you can hire a lawyer to do this but I have saw a lot of web apps and blogs that have those documents and they weren’t written by a lawyer but by the founders themselves.

If you hire a lawyer you can easily expect to pay $2000 USD for that kind of work so maybe you should consider doing this by yourself or hiring a lawyer from overseas. Yes, that can be done because Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are not really “hard” legal docs, they usually say “we will refund your money given X condition” and “The free plan doesn’t have the right to technical support”, so this option is worth considering.

Time: Give them 2 weeks. This kind of work is not that hard for a lawyer so he can do it in that time.

Cost: It can go from $2000 if you hire a lawyer from USA or Europe, but you can pay half that price if you consider hiring a lawyer from overseas.

3. Graphical Design, Logos and that kind of stuff

There are so many good web apps out there that paying a designer to give yours a professional looking is worth the effort.

What you will need from her is basically your image: All your branding, public website design, logos, colours and fonts. To get a better work you must get sure that (s)he has worked in the past doing web design because it’s not the same as doing brochures or packages.

Another tip that can be useful for you is that it will be better if you hire a designer who’s also able with XHTML and CSS, so she makes that work and not your programmers, because leaving that work to the last ones is a sure way to get your web app late.

If you don’t find a designer who can do that work for you, you still can contract services like PSD2HTML and XHTMLized to turn your designs into fully capable XHTML+CSS web pages.

So what must be the result of this stage? All your web app’s pages ready to be coded by your programmers.

Time: It depends a lot on the “size” of your web app, i.e. how many pages does it have. Ryan Carson from Carson Systems reported that it tooks 4.5 weeks to a web designer working full time to get done all the 100+ screens of DropSend, their first web app. I have seen more than this time and less than this time in the same conditions, therefore 4.5 weeks is a good guess for a medium-sized web app.

Cost: Depending on where your designers are located, it can go from $8,000 and downwards. Consider outsourcing your design to cheaper countries where you will find at least the same quality for less money.

3. Programming

That’s the part I like the most because I’m a programmer, and although I love programming I really hate the difficulty of estimating programming times. There’s no way to get a correct time estimation for a programming task so be prepared to manage a lot of uncertainties.

Anyway, you need a programmer so you will do better if you understand the stages of web apps programming:

1. Design: Logical design for your web app and database.
2. Programming: Writing code.
3. Testing: Getting sure the code works well and is not vulnerable to average attackers.
4. Maintenance: Once the web app is out you will find a lot of bugs (yup, that’s inevitable) and you’ll want to add new features.

The first 3 stages are the ones you will have to pay during development time. Maintenance is a posterior task.

Now, business processes you must expect to cover are:

• Application itself: What your clients will see.
• Billing: Your clients must pay you and you need the corresponding subsystems to handle those payments.
• Support: Your clients will have questions and you need an efficient way to handle those questions.
• Marketing: This can be interpreted in many forms, but usually means you have to integrate in some way your web app with your public website, so you can offer discount coupons and other kind of marketing strategies.

Time: Talking about a medium-sized web app I can say that 8 weeks is a good guess, although 12 weeks will be safer. Anyway, as all the other things it can vary a lot. For example, during the “Web Apps Autopsy” conference presented on SXSW 2007, it was reported that Wufoo.com was developed in 6 months, while Blinksale was developed in 3 months. If you have asked me for their development times before knowing that, I’ll surely say the exact opposite.

Cost: You can find very good programmers starting at a hourly rate of $25 USD, so considering 8 weeks of full time work, you can expect to pay around $8,000 for this job.

4. Copywriting for your website

This is absolutely essential because you must convince your visitors to turn into clients. You can hire a freelance writer if you like but I highly recommend you to write this by yourself since you are the web app owner and nobody knows better how do you want to show it. Now, don’t get me wrong because I don’t write a lot about copywriting, it’s not one of my stronger skills so I can’t talk a lot about it. Therefore my best advice is to put special attention to this aspect of your web application because it can be determinant in its success.

If you want good copywriting advice visit CopyBlogger.com or Seth Godin’s Blog.

Time: 5 days working full time is a safe guess.

Cost: Free as in free of charge. Time needed.

5. Promotion

Promotion is a very special part of your web application development. It can start as early as once you have a logo to show so you can put a form on your web page and collect email address. This way you can announce to your subscribers once your web app is launched and then keep them informed of major upgrades.

There are many ways to promote your web app and is up to you what to choose. You can pay a little fortune for 30min in a conference or you can use 30 ways to promote your web app for less than $1000 ;).

Time: Promotion is something you will have to do for ever in the form of writing a blog or putting banners on famouse websites.

Cost: There are web apps that have not payed anything for promotion while others actively pay for it in some way or another. It all depends on your connections, but to give you a guess, you can expect to pay at least $2000 to get the ball rolling.

6. Others

OK, so I guide you throug the process of web application creation, but still there are other costs that you should consider:

• Housing/Hosting: You need servers somewhere. If you use just one dedicated server (a safe guess for a new web app) you can expect to pay $100/mo plus $100 setup fee.
• Merchant account/Payment Gateway: You can easily expect to pay $1000 for these two things, and it can go up to $2500 if you are not based in the US or Europe.
• Accounting and trademark: $1,000.

Resuming, these are the figures you can expect to get your medium-sized web application in the street:

Time: 16 weeks (not all the tasks are done linearly).
Cost: Around $22,000 (unfortunately prices do sum linearly , and you will always have to pay more than what you expected).

Now you have to start worrying about paying a programmer to do maintenance work, paying somebody to support your clients, payment gateway fees, promotion, etc. But don’t get discouraged by the apparently difficulty. As I sad creating a web application is very exciting, but is even more exciting when you see people like it ;).

Other useful resources:

• The cost of bootstrapping your application: The figures behind DropSend, part I by Ryan Carson.
• Bare Naked App: The making of Amigo by Carson Systems
• SXSW: The figures behind top web apps in Read/WriteWeb

Now that you know how to take your web app from idea to actual product please consider subscribing to Roberto Alamos dot Com by email or RSS. Lots of good information here ;).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Online business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.