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Ask HN: Side-project website creation tools?

2 points by tstegart ↗ HN
Hey Folks, A friend and I are thinking of working on a (small) side project and I'm stumped over what tools to use to create our website. Basically it will be a listing of all the organic meat farms in our state that a user can search to find the products being sold near their location. For example, you could search for a grass-fed beef farm within 20 miles of your zip code.

I haven't really worked with websites using lots of data and needing search capabilities before. I am ok with using a bit of CSS and a small (emphasis on small) amount of HTML to tweak the design, but I'm really not familiar with anything more complicated than that. Ideally, I would like a solution available for free or a low monthly cost (this is a side project after all).

Here are the goals/workflow/revenue thoughts:

A farmer/rancher would register for an account and fill out a form with their address, the types of meat they sell, whether they deliver or require pick-up, the characteristics of the product (organic, grass-fed, hormone free), and any other relevant data.

A consumer would come to the site, not need to register, and search for products by type (for example, hormone free, grass fed beef), and be able to limit a search to a certain distance from their zip code or see the results on a map. If they click on a result they would be taken to the farm's website or a results/bio page with a phone number.

Revenue would probably come from email marketing to customers who sign up, or from ads shown on the page or a yearly fee to farmers.

Any thoughts? Wordpress, Weebly? I'm not really sure how all the options available to me would work with all the searching users would be doing. Mapping seems an important component, and registration is a biggie. But I DO NOT need eCommerce abilities, as its a side project and I don't want to get into the business of selling food products over the internet. Ideas, suggestions?

10 comments

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rartichoke
What makes you think someone will do this for free for you?

You're asking for a custom site with custom data that is searchable in many different ways. You're asking someone to come up with an entire implementation to your idea.

I can't give you an accurate quote with such little info but what you're looking at is likely going to be north of free. I'd expect somewhere in the few thousand dollar range.

tstegart
I said free or low cost. I'm not looking to low-ball anyone here or ask for free work on one of my ideas from the HN community. I'm looking for something out there that I can shoehorn my idea into at a low cost. It seems like what I'm looking for is done a lot on the web, and I was looking for ideas on who does it at a low cost. I can get a cheap e-commerce site done for practically free or for $7-$30 a month that charges cards, ships packages, calculates taxes and has stats and searches. It seems like someone, somewhere would be offering something less technical for the same price or less. So do you know of anyone?
rartichoke
Comparing an e-commerce site to what you want is like trying to compare a tarantula's fangs to the rudders on a speed boat.

I'm not trying to bust your chops but I'd be curious as to what makes you think your idea is less technical than an e-commerce site. What basis did you use to make that conclusion?

tstegart
Well, it seems that a shopper would search for different characteristics of a product and be given search results, much like I want a user to be able to do. They could then calculate shipping, which is analogous to calculating distances between two points. A user could enter product data, much like I want users to do, and site registration could keep data from different users separate.

I'm actually thinking of using an e-commerce site and just not putting product data in, rather each "farm" would be a product and have tags associated with it and when you narrow down the tags you get the farms as a result. Seems like the cheapest option at the moment given the other answers in this thread.

rartichoke
It's not as simple as you think it is.

You mentioned wanting to allow farmers to make an account and add in their details of various stuff along with having their own profile.

That is much different than a typical e-commerce setup. Most product sites have products. Which account added the product doesn't matter. There's no "show me all shoes filtered by the user of Mary", it's "show me all shoes by price filtered by size, etc.".

I also encourage you to research shipping cost calculators that let you use them seamlessly in your custom site.

Also I'm not trying to discourage you from executing your idea. You're free to do whatever you want but I'm just saying you'll have to spend a decent amount of $ to get exactly what you want up and working as a reasonable solution.

krapp
Hire someone to do it in wordpress or any decent PHP framework for you. If you expect to make money on it you should expect to pay for the labor of making it, after all. What you're proposing is a complex implementation. Just because you consider it a side project, doesn't mean it would take any less work to pull off.
tstegart
Do you know of any providers that would charge a monthly fee instead of setting it up from scratch? Maybe I've misjudged, but this (searching data added in by users) is something common that a web service out there would already offer.
krapp
There are services which would charge for hosting, and provide a general purpose UI for a database backend. You could check out Wordpress' hosted service or Adobe's Business Catalyst, maybe, but if you're looking for a turnkey solution which won't require any real effort to pull off, you're not going to find it. Unless you want what basically amounts to a blog and some static pages, someone's going to have to build it from some value of "scratch."
tstegart
Thanks. I'm a little surprised by the answers in this thread. I guess I run into what I'm kinda looking for so much I thought that it wouldn't be a big deal to find a turnkey solution. Everyday I use mobile apps that show me where things nearby are and how far away and allow me to search product listings. I dunno, I guess I thought it would be a thing I could set up in 30 minutes like Shopify because it seems so ubiquitous. The fact that I couldn't find a solution after Googling should have been a hint, but I figured it was just hiding and HN would know. Thanks again.
krapp
Simplicity isn't easy. Chances are if your idea hasn't already been implemented elsewhere, and it's any good, then it can't be whipped up in half an hour. Good luck.