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There's a website I got involved with -- I built the first version on Drupal 6, with a hacked location_search module (for free). It kind of works, I am not proud of it but surely there are a lot worse sites out there. It's about 1000 nodes with some location search and mapping. The site owner has about 6-800 dollars to get it ported to D7 and clean it up. First we tried with a Hungarian guy who was inept in it. Then another Hungarian company which did some progress (still on D6) but simply disappeared after some time. Then I put up an ad on gdo/jobs and we (we -- the is my brother's) got a promising sound quote -- my benchmark question was asking what modules they would use. This dude only made promises and never delivered. So -- where do you find reliable companies that can handle a site for less than a thousand bucks?
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This relates to the wider issues in some of your other posts about the way the Drupal community and Drupal industry work.
I have been building Drupal sites for about two years, attended DrupalCon London and a few smaller meetups, and am watching with a mixture of excitement and concern. Barriers to entry are high. There are a few reasons. One is that Drupal is a both framework and (with the contrib modules) a powerful, complex and untidy CMS, so there is a lot to learn. Another is that the Drupal project is getting bigger, and could probably do with a clearer structure in the community to reflect this (speaking from the point of view of someone who wants to improve skills and get more involved). Thirdly, people who closely involved with improving Drupal are understandably too busy to have much time to help people who are lower down the food chain. And yet Drupal is commercially successful.
In a way it is good that Drupal shuts the door on the kind of chancers who appear in their thousands for Wordpress and Joomla work (one London-based firm offers a Joomla eCommerce site for GBP200). But let us be honest, the barriers to entry can only be good for the businesses of the established Drupal shops, so the barriers serve a commercial a purpose.
You're completely right that getting the small jobs done in Drupal is increasingly hard. I see two problems in this space.
First, the demand for qualified Drupal developers outstrips the supply. This has been a consistent problem for the past 5-6 years. We're doing a much better job now than ever before at training new developers, but the market has grown at the same time. That means that anyone with even modest Drupal skills usually ends up working full time, or on high pressure high margin projects, and can't spend much time on smaller budget projects.
Second, the marketplace for connecting people with Drupal work and the service providers that might be doing that work is really bad. Groups.drupal.org doesn't provide rich enough tools to be an efficient marketplace, and other marketplaces, such as Elance, are too general purpose to be really good at finding specific Drupal talent.
One thing that can help out in your situation is to make good use of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so forth. Spreading the word as widely as possible that you're looking for service providers helps mitigate the second problem of the marketplace.
-Robert Douglass
The way I see it, many GDO groups are largely being "polluted" by job offers, making them less likely to be useful, and at the same time offer very little in the way of services for this constant need for new developers we all have. At the same time, a distribution by Epiqo is centered around that very need, and we considered using it for the french job offers site, to remove the weight of job offers on gdo/france. Maybe it would be time to offload the jobs market burden to a specific site built on this - or something else - to both restore the usefulness of GDO and offer better services to the Drupal job market.
I realize this seems to have very little to do with chx' request, but once we see things that way, it becomes obvious that the marketplace is just an extension of this approach, and could help on such requests.
FGM / OSInet.
You're looking for "reliable companies" for "less than a thousand bucks". You can't have everything. You yourself probably charge hundreds an hour for freelance and the vast majority of reliable contract developers charge at least $100/h which means any company will need to charge significantly more than that per hour, particularly if they're in the "reliable" category. And these small jobs will almost always need to be on an hourly basis as you'll blow your whole budget just generating a quote otherwise.
My advice in this particular instance would be to hire someone who's inexperience but wants to learn. They'll take more time, they'll need more guidance, and some stuff might need to be redone, but at least then both parties get something out of the deal. You get a site upgraded on the cheap, they get much needed experience. But if you're looking for someone who promises everything at no cost... well... you get what you pay for.
My first paid job was indeed a 750 EUR website. It knew well it was underpaid, but the deal was exactly the one you mention: they get a website for cheap, I get to grow my experience with real work.
The requirement weren't simple and it took me more than 70 hrs to deliver the finished product, but I don't regret it. It really helped me a lot.
I think the most difficult aspect of this approach is to find responsible newcomers that understand the value of learning through real work and that take the commitment seriously, or better, professionally.
This $100/h rule works for US and Western Europe, indeed. The story is different for Eastern Europe and India.
My team rates are around $30-40 and our skills (and stability) have been proven in lots of complex projects. There are lots of agencies in US and Europe that outsource complex parts of Drupal projects to us, just because they are much more competent in selling services, building prototypes and talking to local clients, than in Form/DB API, Rules, Features, deployment techniques and other scary things of Drupal world.
So, it's obviously not true that you can't find good Drupal professional for less than $100/h.
But, it's true that risks in getting some problems with communication, sense of responsibility and/or code quality are higher in this range, if you are seeking for US/W.Europe based teams. And these risks are getting huge if you are trying to find US based team within 60-$80/h range.
I would like to add, that we still don't build complete websites from scratch for $1k (if we talk about unique design and theme)
but, it's okay to do 6.x->7.x upgrade for $1k, if the website is not really complex.
My team url, in case anyone is interested: http://drupal.org/node/1315030
I reckon you should do it youself, it's a small job. As you created it, you know more than anyone else. Anyone else coming onboard needs sometime to get head into the 1000 nodes, which you don't need.
Probably there aren't many companies that would do the site for less than a thousand dollars.
I would imagine that there might be freelancers who work with small sites who might be able to do it, but the difficulty would be finding one.
It's discouraging in a sense that there isn't a "low end" to the Drupal development market like there is for WordPress, but part of that is probably due to the increasing complexity of Drupal as a CMS. D7UX may have improved Drupal's usability for content creators, but D7 for site builders and especially developers is more complex than ever before.
~EvanDonovan
Smallish, less complicated Drupal sites can easily be built for under $1000. In fact, I almost always have at least a couple small ongoing Drupal projects.
User training and capabilities come into play here as well. Many users require lots of time to get up to speed and even to find out what they really want out of the site. Training is often times required on more general Internet skills, content creation etc.
Personally, I have found the key is to virtualize the entire process as much as possible. When direct communication (face to face, phone & real-time chat) is limited, a small project can be successful for both sides.
At one time, I had hoped to have a small business making websites for other small businesses in my local area. I figured I'd charge around $500 or so for the site. It didn't take me long to realize I'd be working for a crazy low rate if I did that. With improvements to distributions and install profiles, though, it's getting more likely if you can do it in volume by just doing small variations on a cookie cutter site. Here's a series of blog posts that talks about the idea: http://davehall.com.au/blog/dave/2010/12/24/100-drupal-site-series-part-1-it-possible
I'm not really answering your question, I'm afraid, because I don't know any specific company that does this that I can recommend. There's a pretty massive list at http://groups.drupal.org/available-for-hire that maybe has someone but you'd be on your own with the "reliable" part.
Michelle
The old notion "you get what you pay for" comes to mind here. Over the years I have taken on a number of jobs for clients that started with the cheaper person. They end up spending the money and getting something that doesn't do what they want, constantly crashes, full of bugs, etc. In turn they not only have to pay me to rebuild the site now but to also unfuddle the data that the previous developer utilized and suffer from down time.
Having said that, sites like these are great for people starting out on their own and want to build a portfolio. Unfortunately there isn't a sure fire way to weed out the good from bad there, since they really don't have a portfolio built yet to base their work off of.
My suggestion is for the client to get quotes from some reputable companies and base the budget off of that. Nothing says they have to move to Drupal 7 right away, so take the time and try to raise the additional capital to get the upgrade done right. If not they can actually risk paying more in the long run, with a lot more headaches involved to the site owner and their visitors.
Jamie
Find someone who is just getting started with Drupal and mentor them in building the site for the client's budget. This accomplishes several things:
1. Frees you from doing the bulk of the work.
2. Trains a new Drupaler and gets them valuable experience.
3. Gets the client what they want at their price point.
But, there are some pitfalls:
1. The client needs to buy-in to this. They need to be aware that because of their small budget, they're not going to get a top-tier Drupal developer working on their site.
2. The client needs to be flexible with their desired features and timeline.
3. You need to do some homework in finding the right mentee.
-mike (ultimike on drupal.org)
Hi
Chx is my "little" bro, he's talkin' 'bout my site. It is really not that difficult, you don't need to go into 1000 different nodes. I'd be willing to listen to a reasonable quote, but so far I have very bad experience with Drupal developers (except Chx).
It's hard to do anyting significant for such a constrained budget. However, I've been working successfully with a fantastic offshore guy for at least a couple years now, and he may very well have interest in this kind of job. If you'll send me an email, I'll be happy to hook you guys up. mark at digett dot com. Good luck!
I've done a few sites under 1K in the past and they've always come through someone I know or someone who has recommended me for the job. The most efficient arrangement so far has been being in the consultant role - recommending which steps to take, pros/cons of different approaches, untangling a mess when it happens. On these projects I rarely ever write code any more and someone else gets to essentially learn how to use Drupal. IMHO a win:win situation.