19 Hours Excessive to Code Single Wordpress Page?

[Kingalan1]

My developer says that is will take 19 hours to modify a listing page of the wpcasa London real estate theme because the existing template is difficult to customize.

I am attaching an image of the existing page before customization and an image of a final mock up.

Is 19 hours a reasonable amount of time to customize this page?

Look forward to feedback.

New Design is visible at: https://imgur.com/a/42XBqDD

Alan

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[effectdigital]

Always a difficult question to answer! This actually depends upon what you're paying in terms of development, too. A junior or intermediate developer will take much longer to do things than a senior WordPress specialist as the junior will have to research everything they are doing, in addition to carrying out the work. A senior developer will cost much more per hour, but may finish the work significantly faster.

Instead of just thinking in hours only, you want to be considering the overall time/cost. If you pay a senior developer 3x more (hourly) but they believe they can be finished in 25% of the time (and are willing to commit to that) - then you just need to change the type and calibur of resource you are working with. Always do the math.

Here you actually have a lot of stuff going on. On the old page, although the nav is blue - it 'feels' as if the page's primary colour is yellow. On your new page, yellow is pretty much reserved for stand-out CTAs and the rest of the design elements are brought in line and re-styled to match the nav (blue).

The image carousel is altered significantly so that it actually looks like a proper image carousel, rather than an image with random thumbnails under it. That's a good move but again, every change is a new brick or a new layer of paint for the system.

You're altering the sidebar significantly, removing the form and clip-art to replace it all with CTA buttons and images of real people which inspires more confidence.

You have whole sections of new content, tables of data under the main content. That stuff didn't exist before and you're also now pulling in reviews which you weren't doing before. All of these data hard-points have to be found or created, linked and affixed to the new layout.

Considering that you're getting actual development work _and _also re-design all in one for 19 hours work - to me that doesn't sound too bad. A myriad of little things can take hours to track down and alter, to stabilise and get looking just right.

If you want to haggle maybe ask if it could be done in 17 hours but much less than that would be taking the Michael a bit (IMO)

As stated, some devs with front-end design experience and a WP specialism may be able to do this in a few hours, but you'd probably pay a far higher rate. If in doubt, find more experienced WP developers and get some comparative quotes

I think the new design is better from an SEO perspective (the granular, tabular data is something Google will latch onto and they'll like the reviews being pulled in to... MAKE SURE they're marked up with schema). It's also better from a CRO (conversion-rate optimisation) perspective IMO, so I'd advise going ahead with it

[Kingalan1]

Thanks so much for your detailed response!!

The 19 hours that I was quoted did not include the design or mock up, it was strictly for coding.

Did your response assume that design was also involved or was it only for coding?

In term of hourly rates I understand what you mean and agree 100%. I would rather pay $100/hour for a senior developer than $26 for a junior developer who will take 5 times as long. I believe there is a huge difference in productivity and quality among developers. It is the final cost and quality that matter not the hourly rate.

Thanks, 
Alan

[effectdigital]

Hey Alan, sorry for the delayed response I've been away a little while. So you have multiple facets of design. Did you know some developers specialise in the front-end look and feel of a site, without touching much SQL, back-end stuff or databases? In my opinion, stuff like Adobe InDesign or the mocking up of a a page layout, is only part of the design process. If you're using coding to translate a 'static' design into a living, breathing web-page, to me that's still design work (although it relies upon coding). It depends whether you consider front-end dev to be a design facet, a dev facet or somewhere in-between.

It's not that long ago that all designers were expected to know some HTML and CSS, in many cases - quite in depth with possible PHP extensions to their knowledge. Knowing what's feasible, what's possible and how to attach the 'pretty pictures' to functions is IMO, still design work whilst the hard-core developers focus on the complex additions and more technical site facets. I personally wouldn't work with any designer who just produced images of work and nothing else.

With my view of design being how it is, since your initial question shows that the developer is 'using code' to 'alter the look' of the site, I would say that regardless of mock ups - design is involved.

You are right, there are developers who actually know what they're doing - then there are 'WordPress plugin installers' who will 'masquerade' as fully fledged developers and take your money. Watch out, many sharks roam the digital seas!