Hi guys,

I have a client who wants a mammoth project carrying out. I'm just getting some rough numbers together so I can give him a quote. I'm a designer not a programmer so I'm curious to know what skills would be need to recreate something like http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/.

I'm thinking in particular to the on-line payment system, product pages where users can view different colours or products and the similar product areas.

Could you advise?

Thanks in advance,

Brendan.

Just having a quick look, I would say:

Flash (for the the animated images on the various pages)
Java Servlets/JSP (judging from the Login Page, looks like it's java)
Some kind of database, MySQL maybe?
Then you'd need to integrate some kind of merchant system for actually handling the visa transactions etc...

Anyway, that was just with a quick look, there are lots of other ways you can do it too, but that's what they are using...

You forgot

a few load balanced servers to handle all those visitors :D

A while back, I worked on a catalog company website that did about $8M in online sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was a total site re-design, and re-build with all custom programming. It entailed 2 designers, & 1 programmer working on that project full-time for about two months, plus one network engineer and one account executive devoting about 25% of their time to that project for the same time period. You do the math :)

WebHTTrack website copier for linux, wait thats cheating!