How would you build this?

[asun2art]

I need your opinion guys. What kind of platform do you think would be best to run a large portal website like this: http://www.surfline.com/home/index.cfm

What would be the cost involved if I e-lanced it out and what kind of development time are we talking about?

Mahalo ~
Nick

[neilakoga]

this one is obviously written in cold fusion (.cfm)

i'd use asp.net but i presume that the majority of users on here would use php

a lot of factors rest on where the data is coming from, are they xml feeds external to the site? are they all on a local database

you will need some kind of database as the site supports logins

here's what i reckon you would need

database to hold logins (mysql/mssql)

site written in some kind of server side language (asp.net/asp/php/etc)

secure server for payment transactions

some way of holding all the info (if you're using a database for logins then you would be presumably using this for the site data)

a secure back office as you are offering a payment method for logins

If i was developing this on my own I would expect 2 months development time to allow for design/development and testing

also you would need to think about setting up a merchant account with your bank (i dont know if its different in the usa) for accepting transfers from your online processing (this normally takes a week to setup)

if you're getting weather reports as well you would need to find out how you would get the data in, i'm sure it would be easy enough to find somewhere that offers a weather report in xml feed format

oh and if you're sending out alerts you need to think about how you'd do that - email, sms, etc so you gotta look at costing options for that

if the company i worked for did this we'd probably be looking at least £5-6k

it might be better to think of it as a 2 phase plan, basically create a stripped down version of the site without all the costly functionality and see what kind of user interest/figures you get before investing fully

i hope this gives you a few pointers to consider