This has easily been the best project I've ever worked on. The coding part sucks, but the rewards are high. I learned a lot making this site; here's away to get all the good part with a minimum of the headache.

Couple ways to do this... be careful as this project can easily eat your life! It's completely devoured mine. I lost my job, my car, my wife, my kids. It was the losing the dog that really sucked! Don't let this happen to you! Putting up a skeleton is easy and can be done in a day. But that's freshman level... if you want a completely smooth and customized site, learning how to customize all the code in the forum, gallery, etc is a 3-4 month learning curve of PHP hell. That's where you're gonna get really stuck - even if you know HTML.

Option A - Do It Yourself

If you really have a lot of time to spare, just do what I did, get a domain, just go to Mochahost.com (they are good, registering your domain is about $50 and the monthly cost is cheap like $5-$7 a month - and please note these charges are NOT included in our design fees), get a tier 1 or tier 2 account, and hack away! It is reasonably easy to get a basic skeleton up there, but if you don’t know even HTML it's going to take timmmme. But after you're all done the only time commitment is occasionally zapping spammers out of the forums and moderating the forums for to extinguish latter day high school spats before they spread, and bathroom humor etc The key is making things dynamic - making as much of the site as interactive as possible so the whole class owns it.

Option B - We set it up and show you what you need to keep it going for a lifetime

	Platinum $1000 Clone high school site skeleton + 40 hours of customization 1 year free upkeep & use of our music streams 1 year free Live Help
	Gold $500 Clone high school site skeleton + 20 hours of customization 6 months free upkeep & use of our music streams
	Silver $250 Clone high school site skeleton + 10 hours of customization 3 months free upkeep & use of our music streams
	Bronze $100 Clone high school site skeleton only + 2 hours of walking you through the resources

Upkeep is basically me helping you on a weekly basis customize your site, doing occasional maintenance (backups, prevention from hacker attacks, etc) Initial period upkeep is limited to 5 hours/week. Cost for upkeep after the initial setup period or beyond the intial period's 5 hours/week is is $20/hour. Remember, the vast portion of time is spent on you figuring out what you're going to put up!.

Cloning our site We set the whole thing up and customize the crap out of it. that will basically get the domain, make a carbon copy of Conroe86.org but with your text, your logo (no tigers etc), and your background/button style if you like. The initial setup period is the point where the site is cloned and we both agree everything looks good. This will take me a day to do (I can do it by now with eyes closed!), the major time is going to be you figuring out what graphics and text to use, etc. Depending on the level of service that your are buying from us. I will spend extra time helping you customize, such as graphics, music, and inserting the text you want.

All pages can be customized - Gallery, Chat, Discussion, Links, Forum, In Memoriam. Without customization they look very sterile and, in today's world of MySpace, nothing you'd be proud of. The goal is to make something you can show to your kids - and keep classmates coming back. We can set up a Live Help for you and also a Submit Form for personal information (our Reunion Book)

We'll transfer any video to the flash format (source must be in mpg format) I'd make all the rollover buttons in your colors etc. And depending on the size of your school, I'd even let you stream the music on our server (and you can edit/add/delete whichever songs you like)

Even on a budget, this will save you the most IMHO. The idea is to get it perfect and tailored to your specific year - then let it grow by the members' actions, not yours!

Ways to Make Money to Pay for This

Set up a paypal account so you can collect fees for your event to pay for the site, etc.

For some extra income get a local sponsor to put an ad on your site. That may be a bit problematic if you have some content they may not like - such as a heavy metal song where the singer talks about, well you get the idea. We feel there is an ideal balance between allowing individuals to express themselves, and not allowing truly offensive content.

©2006 World Wide Whitmore Inc.
All major credit cards, checks, money orders accepted.
Other sites I made:
http://www.tranceamericana.org
Contact: Jeff Whitmore jeff@conroe86.org or use the Live Help icon below: