I’m working with a media company doing some IT infrastructure work. They’ve been having some problems with their websites and asked me about it, but I’m not a programmer/developer. I’ve taken a look at things and they’re not that great. In particular their main site is based on Turdpress and has been plagued with exploited vulnerabilities and crashes lately.
The goal:
A solid and scalable hosted environment, with an easy to use CMS (news stories get posted regularly) that (hopefully) won’t get exploited and won’t roll over when a big story breaks and site traffic shoots up.
The company has five radio stations and a TV station. In my opinion, all of the sites could use some improvement. I think having some sort of consistent design across the radio stations would be nice. I think having something like an RSS feed from the main TV site (where news gets posted regularly) to show current stories on the other station sites would be nice (update once to the main site, see everywhere via RSS feed). The main TV site would have multiple users making contributions.
I see this as two chunks of development…The front-end design, and the backend hosting.
I thought I’d ask around here and see if anybody was interested in the project. We could maybe chat via Zoom/Skype/whatever to go over ideas. I’m unsure of the overall $$$$ available and doubly unsure of what you’d need to build it. Maybe hit me up and we can chat about it.
Thanks!
James
You should probably ask Wendell or maybe Ryan directly. IIRC, they do offer these kinds of services but I am unsure.
Try here?
https://www.level1techs.com/contact-us
What’s your budget? Most shops that know what they’re doing charge $10k just to talk to you these days unless you’ve got some shop trying to cut you a deal or do a favor for you.
Square space Is Always an Option lol
I’m sure the company owner is thinking like a 6-pack and some concert tickets. (I kid…)
Perhaps for references you can take a peek at the god awful sites of your local radio stations. I know that Cumulus and iHeart have a standardized template that’s used for all of their stations. Not that I think these guys would want to just emulate that look and feel, but it gives you an idea.
I’m honestly way out of my element on the software/graphic design side of things so I’ll defer costs and timelines and such to the people that actually do that work. So you guys tell me…What would a realistic budget look like? Maybe it should be two projects…A template site design for the radio station side of things and another project for the TV site design with all the CMS/news and stuff.
Thanks!
James
For less than $10k budget your best result is going to be to look at something done with square space IMHO
“scalable hosted environment”
Are you really sure you need that for a TV and Radio Stations? Typically these companies produce the same content for all users. In this case you just need one server with a caching service like cloudflare in front of it.
A scalable hosted environment is only needed if your users can upload their own content and/or get served personalized content. (An algorithm decides what they see)
When it comes to website design square space or a similar service is the easiest, but maybe you want to stay independent. They censored websites in the past and your media company could be ideologically opposed to it.
For the content management service I can’t judge yet how complex you need it. For simple postings of articles with images, videos or audio I could do that with a Python-Django backend. It’s highly unlikely you need 100% unique code. Instagram was coded with Python-Django and some people have created Twitter clones with it.
I’m not a professional web developer, but I’m a Python programmer who created his own websites (frontend and backend) with Python-Django to share his content.
You would need to share your existing websites for me to get a better idea.
Hi James - I’m new here, but I work for IT consulting (not staffing) company, that offers many services, front-end and back-end.
Like Wendell mentioned, 10K really doesn’t go far, but I’m pretty sure we could have a conversation to discuss their needs and goals.
Sorry I’ve been a bit MIA…The main site “crashed” and the current manager/designer (who has been mostly MIA) claimed it was hacked, contaminated, and could not be restored.
Long story short, spinning up a new host and restoring from backups resurrected the site, but the station owner decided to go with a new design from the current manager/designer, and move the hosting to this company as well. So the design/maintenance/and hosting for that site is taken care of for at least the next year. 
That does leave a handful of really neglected sites for the radio side of the business that seems to be registered and hosted all over the place. Those do not have nearly as much traffic and do not have any of the scaling issues.
The internet wasn’t really much of a plan here apparently. it just happened. I’m going to attempt to bring some order to the chaos.
I’ll ping you guys in the next few days. For now I have a pile of stuff immediately in front of me (new firewalls, new switches, new WiFi, and some XCP-ng goodness).
THANKS!!!
Sounds good. Let me know if there’s any assistance that we can offer.