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I want to open a new website. Something big.

For the programing part it would be like an hotel booking website but different.

The question is, how much would the entire programmation of a website (consider tripadvisor.com as an example) cost if I would hire a programmer or a couple of them?

You would need to get in contact with some web developers/designers and give more details to get a price for this.

In real life, the cost of a big website tends to be ongoing and open-ended.

I suggest that you develop your website and service incrementally.

Well I also got some programming skills ( studying IT) but I still haven't seen any web oriented languages. So my question would be should I wait until I learn some PHP maybe? Or should I already start to contract someone?

sounds like a good idea, thanks!

This estimate is out by at least one order of magnitude.

.

Remember I am going off what a free lancer would get paid and that is a pretty big site, but what would think would be a fair price?

You likely will do better breaking it down into smaller "chunks" and getting a price on that.

Saying I wan't something like tripadvisor.com isn't something which can be priced as a single price item.  TripAdvisor probably has 20-30 developers, db engineers, artists, web designers, and marketing people working full time so a good estimate would be ~$1M to $2M a year (and honestly that probably is low).

Now I am not saying you need $1M I am saying based on the limited info you are providing and your comparison site the project you have described (which is probably not what you need) is in the range of a couple mill a year.

Something like :
http://codecanyon.net/item/js-hotel-booking-system/479152?WT.ac=search_item&WT.seg_1=search_item&WT.z_author=joomlaskin

http://codecanyon.net/item/online-hotel-booking-system/2680320?WT.ac=search_item&WT.seg_1=search_item&WT.z_author=bestsoftinc

http://codecanyon.net/item/booking-system/87919?WT.ac=search_item&WT.seg_1=search_item&WT.z_author=Convergine


Not too sure if they are ready-to-go, you may have to modify them to your needs :)

At minimum, a site like the one linked would cost $20k to launch. $80k+ is more likely, depending on requirements.

The other option is some $15/h offshore development company, with which it will cost $10k over 12 months to never launch.

An important question here is, "how much like Tripadvisor?" If you're OK with a finicky low-end knockoff, you can probably get PHP programmers in the third world to do this for US$20,000. If you want something scalable, feature-full, and maintainable, with a good recommendation system, I would say US$200,000+, on the low end.

You'll need people, or an AI, to gather data for the site. I would recommend the former. Developing a good AI will cost a pretty penny, while data entry people are cheap, and once you get going you can crowdsource it.

Additionally, you'll need good negotiators to make any money with this. You can do it yourself if you're a people person, or outsource it to those who are. Again, the latter is going to set you back quite a bit.

If you're still interested, PM me. ;)

It really depends on your vision as people have stated.

If I were planning to build a tripadvisor competitor, I'd probably start with a million dollars or so, only half of which is development, the other 1/2 is for marketing because it'd be a really brutal space to compete in. I wouldn't expect anything of decent quality for less than $40k, but personally I don't think it's worth doing anything unless it's done right and that's going to be $100-$200k. You need a good CFO, at least 1 really good coder, a web designer, support staff, etc. You won't be profitable day one and have to plan to maintain this staff for a year or so while getting to break even. Realistically, you're going to need many millions to compete in the space, so this would just be a good proof of concept seed stage.

On the other hand, maybe you don't really mean that you want it to be just like trip advisor.. maybe you could get away with a $20 template of themeforest. You're going to have to write out a full detailed document and draw out some basic wireframes to get a real quote. It'll range highly, but don't go for cheap -- it'll just end in disappointment 90% of the time.