$100 Drupal Site Series: Part 1 - Is it Possible?
In late October Gdzine posed the question “$100 CMS web site feasible? What do you think?” on LinkedIn and the question was also posted on groups.drupal.org. These posts lead to lengthy discussion threads. Some people accused Gdzine of trolling and others claimed that it wasn’t possible, but a few of us argued it was possible to build a Drupal site for $100.
Over the next week or so I’ll be blogging how I would go about delivering $100 Drupal sites. $100 is in United States Dollars. I won’t be providing a complete blueprint, but there should be enough information to help get you started.
I have some experience building large numbers of production sites using Drupal for a small price per site. In 2009 I built, deployed and managed 2086 sites for a European client. For most of this year I have been offering training and consulting around some of the tools and techniques this blog series will cover.
Is it Feasible?
Several companies already offer low cost Drupal site solutions. Acquia’s Drupal Gardens is probably the most well known cheap Drupal site building service with its freemium model. Wedful offers a Drupal based site for couples getting married for only 95USD for the first year, then 25USD every following year including hosting. Spoon Media’s Pagebuild service offers a customised Drupal platform for 30USD per month. I am sure there are others operating in the same space. wordpress.com offers a similar service using WordPress. I have no idea how financially viable these businesses are, but I think it is safe to assume that they’ve done some research and planning to get to this point.
These services all rely on making their money on the turnover rather than the margin. Most consultants, myself included, make our money by charging a good hourly rate, but we only get paid for the time we work. These services rely on investing up front then waiting for the long tail revenue. For example if you invest 50,000USD up front into building the service, then you have to sell 500 sites just to break even.
Target Market
In order to make these services viable, you have to target a particular market segment. Customers for a $100 site are likely to be “mum and dad” businesses, they don’t have a lot of money to spend and are also unlikely to have a lot knowledge about the web. A lot of the customers are likely to think “the internet” is that blue e on their desktop or Facebook. I know of several small businesses who think that Yellow Pages advertising is not giving the return on investment they want, but can’t afford 1500-2000USD for a decent quality brochure site. These are the people this service should be seeking to attract.
Why Bother?
Most Drupal developers aspire to work for switched on clients who want high quality sites. Working with well known brands is always a bonus. No one is really going to be interested in hearing about how you built the site for “Joe and Jo’s Diner”. There is still a lot of problem solving involved in building a service like this, but these problems are very different to those found in large scale site builds. Also many of the people seeking a $100 site are likely to be high needs clients who undervalue the skills involved in building a site.
What’s Next?
All posts in this series will be tagged with “$100 drupal site”. In my next post I will cover what I think you need in terms of infrastructure and resources to make something like this work.
I have proposed a session for DrupalCon Chicago on this topic, please consider voting for it.