Website designer - Matrimonial

P

Praks

Skilled
Hi,

Friend's dad is looking to build a matrimonial website. Can anyone provide answers to following questions ?

1 - What kind of bandwidth, hosting plans & softwares (CMS) are required to build such a site. Is there any ready made software available to manage matrimonial site backend ?
2 - What kind of technology (hardware, software, cloud, php/asp) big sites like shaadi, bharatmatrimony, jeevansathi uses ?
3 - There are many web design sites which claims to provide script which can create similar looking sites like shaadi, How reliable are they ?
4 - What kind of skills a person should have to manage matrimony portal ?
5 - What kind of email, SMS servers to use.

Any other tips ?

Is there anyone on forum who have "excellent" skills for making such a website ?

Can anyone share name of websites where I can hire good web designers apart from freelancing sites like freelancer.com
 
Praks

1. Bandwidth and hosting plan with depend on how active is your TO BE website. You can even start with a shared hosting plan which is not expensive and can gradually move on to a dedicated server as and when required. I am assuming here that the site will not be launched on a grand scale, if its that way that you need a dedicated server from the start.
You can go with a CMS (like vbulletin) or can go with your own website. In my opinion, building your own website is better as it will give you more control and say in designing and implementation. CMS, though modifiable to large extent (coding/designing) cant give you that.

2. These all are customized websites I think running on dedicated server. Hardware is a backend thing which I cant tell. For php/asp,I have to check.

3. Again I would say go with your site built as these similar looking sites may appear cheap but they can be lot buggy and security risk can be high.

4. I am assuming that by word 'manage' you are referring to the non-coding/designing part. If the site is developed well, a good admin/moderator panel can be setup and site can be maintained by average person of basic knowledge.

5. It will depend on exactly for what you are looking for these (marketing or on site). Need more clarification.

Ask the developer to develop site with SEO in mind (like content,urls,etc) and also keep SEO running for your site through link-building,etc.
I would also suggest to not go for online developers and rather look for local developers. I think here on TE, there must be many developers who can get the job done. I don't develop websites but I have managed a few big sites (developing, managing, SEO, SMO, campaigning,etc).
 
1. a) If really serious about the venture, then go for atleast a VPS for now and then switch to dedicated/cloud servers once thing really gets going. swatkats varkey may be of help in suggesting some good VPS and Dedicated servers. Bandwidth as already said depends on the number of visitors expected. Most hosting plans for VPS and Dedicated will come with more than enough bandwidth for your venture (atleast in the initial phase).

b) Talking about CMS there are quite a few options. And you should really go for a CMS solution as it is easy to maintain on your own or by some non-technical staff. Basic changes can be made by you through a well refined GUI.
The most popular CMS are Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. Each one will be have its pros and cons but will definitely suit your needs. You better hire a developer who is experience with the CMS you want to use and make sure he follows all standards of the CMS for better maintainability. Any CMS when used properly can fulfill your needs. Obviously custom modules and themes will have to be developed for each.
Also if going for core PHP the developer might start with a framework like Zend/Yii/Codeigniter . They too are a solid building base for your site.

2. The most prominent technologies are ASP.NET and PHP . They will most probably run on dedicated servers for the least and even maybe multiple servers for load balancing. (This should be thought of when you have a very large number of visitors)

3. As themasterguy said they will look cheap

4. A CMS comes with a good admin panel. A little training will help you a lots in managing your own website.

5. For email servers you use the google apps corporate plans. Apart from the SMTP servers of Google you also get a web interface the same as Gmail branded by your name for your accounts. Have used the free one and so far very good. SMS Servers there are lots out there. I am not well read on this. So will skip this part.

Other things to look out for:
1. SEO
2. THE UI (Most important)
3. Your Site Load time (No one likes waiting)
4. Cross browser compatibility.
5. Try not to go for a exotic CMS that no one is using. your future maintainability will be in danger.
6. A solid back-end once your site has enough visitors. So that your site is available all the time. Again first set it up and start running with a decent server/hardware. Then you can improve once the site starts picking up.

You can try elance.com . Apart from freelancers they do have a lot of web development companies from India. You can contact them through elance and probably hire a local one and can meet them in person. make sure the first developer is the right one.
I know about elance because I get my work from there. So have seen a lot of Indians.
 
A simple FF plugin tell you what "technology" the site is using. It tells CMS, Frameworks, Server/OS type etc etc. Home | Wappalyzer

And regarding the site dev part, I would recommend Drupal. Its very highly customizable and tons of plugin available.
Its better to use a recognized CMS then to develop something from scratch as CMS will be much cheaper in time and money. Besides the CMSes are well tested. :p

Just for reference: List of Drupal sites in government (state, provincial, or national) | Drupal Groups
 
mathrisk said:
A simple FF plugin tell you what "technology" the site is using. It tells CMS, Frameworks, Server/OS type etc etc. Home | Wappalyzer

And regarding the site dev part, I would recommend Drupal. Its very highly customizable and tons of plugin available.
Its better to use a recognized CMS then to develop something from scratch as CMS will be much cheaper in time and money. Besides the CMSes are well tested. :p

Just for reference: List of Drupal sites in government (state, provincial, or national) | Drupal Groups
Click to expand...

Oh yea I forgot to add. +1 to Drupal for its flexibility, support and updates
 
I've been experimenting with Drupal over the last year and a half, and my answers are based on my experience with it.

1) It depends on the number of users you have, and the features you need for your site. A social networking site with good access control should support about 10,000 users per server. The same server could support 30-50,000 users if it was more like a classified site, with pages that would be refreshed regularly, but not instantly.
Facebook supports about 7-10,000 users per server, and thats after they've had engineers optimise everything, right down to the linux core.
You'll need to add more servers if you're audience gets bigger, so you'll need someone with expertise in setting up load balancers, and optimizing the database. You'll have to use caching and CDN's as well to take the load of your database, and servers.
Ideally you should use something like Amazons cloud hosting, so that you can grow without worrying about the back end initially.

For the software bit, you could use any of the ready made open source social networking cms's out there, or use Drupal or Joomla which are far more flexible.
Unless you've got a huge IT budget you should stick to an open source cms. Choose one with a large developer community so that help is always at hand. If you choose Drupal you could use Drupals Acquia cloud hosting, which manages everything except the development for you.

2)No idea what they use, but you should first define what kind of a site you want to create, and the kind of user experience you want. Also, keep in mind your server and IT department budget when thinking up what you want.
You can have all the features you need created in advance, but not enabled until your infrastructure/budget supports it.

3)If you're friends considering setting up a matrimony site, then the cost of the actual development will be the lowest spend on his budget. His monthly hosting budget, IT admin spend and advertisement budget will eclipse the cost of the initial development. If he does get a developer who'll optimize everything, cache everything that can be cached, and uses CDN's where ever possible, and who takes the effort to document everything, then his infrastructure and IT costs will be lower in the future. So, it doesn't make sense to skimp and use a script. Unless the script has everything you need.

4)The admin should be experienced with SQL, database management/optimization, Linux, load-balancers, and php. If you're using Drupals Acquia network, then I think this comes in the package.

5)I haven't used any email server other than the one that comes with Linux distros, and I think that should suffice for just sending emails to users, unless you're planning on giving each user a new email address/inbox (which I'm sure users don't want!).
There are a lot of bulk sms gateways in India, and setting up a single sms to be sent to lots of users is not too difficult. It shouldn't be too hard to set it up to send a message per action, but I have no idea about the cost.
In Drupal this would have to be done through a custom module.


Once you've decided on the kind of site you want, how many users you expect to have, and how much you want to spend on IT, then you can start prospecting for a developer. Otherwise you'll land up paying for something that just isn't right for you.
 
Regarding hosting:
My sincere advice is to Start off with a Shared hosting which allocates High Resources Which would be available from$10-15 Call it business shared hosting.
When it Grows up you can move it to a Fully managed VPS like Fully Managed cPanel VPS Hosting by VPSLatch

I agree with members over here. Drupal CMS is too Good with lots of options. Just make sure you Spend Enough for Developing it. Don't go for the Cheap Designing plans.
 
I would like to thank each one of you for very detailed reply. I have copied everything & sent to friend. He will read your valuable comments & reply.

He quicky checked with Wappalyzer. His dad is clearly looking for something like shaadi (dot) com, He ran Wappalyzer on it. Strange enough even thought site is using php, Wappalyzer is not showing php anywhere, It just shows apache, Java script etc. Is it missing something ?

As of now, Few information collected is - Site is hosted on Apache server with php installed. Hosted on rackspace.com on US. How do we find more details on the same so similar site can be built using the same tools/platform. There is no need to copy each & everything, its just they would like to use working & tested technology already in place. Where do we drupal fit in this as no idea on it ?

Can anyone check their site/server & share pls ?
 
Praks said:
I would like to thank each one of you for very detailed reply. I have copied everything & sent to friend. He will read your valuable comments & reply.



He quicky checked with Wappalyzer. His dad is clearly looking for something like shaadi (dot) com, He ran Wappalyzer on it. Strange enough even thought site is using php, Wappalyzer is not showing php anywhere, It just shows apache, Java script etc. Is it missing something ?

As of now, Few information collected is - Site is hosted on Apache server with php installed. Hosted on rackspace.com on US. How do we find more details on the same so similar site can be built using the same tools/platform. There is no need to copy each & everything, its just they would like to use working & tested technology already in place. Where do we drupal fit in this as no idea on it ?

Can anyone check their site/server & share pls ?
Click to expand...

It is not really very easy to predict the server side language used. So thats why Wappalyzer might have missed it.
However the fact that it uses Apache makes it even more obvious that the site will be running PHP. Apache + PHP is the most popular combination.

As you said they using Rackspace.com . They provide cloud and managed hosting hosting, which is what a site with a high load would require and as already suggested in this thread.

So all in allmost probably site runs PHP with a database server(not possible to tell) but mysql is the most popular with PHP and PostgreSQL coming in second place. Even Facebook uses PHP and MySQL though they are optimized by Facebook, but you still know that you cannot go wrong with this combination. Also shaadi.com is using US based cloud/dedicated server.

What more info do you need?

Drupal is PHP framework. It tries to provide a base system with many features already built in (say user login, registration, user management, blog, content management). And the contributed modules get half your work done in no time. And then for the specific functionality you need you creates modules/themes for Drupal which obviously are coded in PHP using the Drupal framework functions for help.
 
@techygeek

Thank you.

I see there are lots of ready made scripts available if you google for shaadi clone etc. What are they ?

Are they reliable to have same look & feel of original site ?
 
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@Praks

Never tried one of those.

You could try and search for one with same functionality.
But same look is a big NO-NO. (Would you visit/like a site that clones everything from some other website? Gives it a cheap feeling)

Also whatever script you take make sure the community/commercial support is good.
Coz you may be able to set it up now, but if any problems happen later on you will need help.


A search on google gve this Shaadiclone PHP Matrimonial Script | Online Matrimonial PHP Script
They have demos for front end and admin area have a look.

Just saw this now. have no experience whatsoever.
So do some research online to know more about it.
 
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@techygeek,
Yeah, you are right, that's the clone site. looks almost same but not sure how it will function in real.

Friend is looking for good web designers. I see you have elance profile, Do you work on such project ?

@All
Can anyone tell me who designs TE ? I mean look & feel is just awesome, No bright & flashy colour.
 
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Praks

I do development only using Drupal at the moment.
Also I am not a web "Designer" only a Web Developer (i.e. I work more on functionality and the design is usually provided by the client in terms of PSDs or images)

AFAIK TE uses a paid theme from Vbulletin, not sure tho.
 
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