From Yelvington, The first rule of coding for Drupal:
This is a message to prospective Drupal developers. I’m going to propose this as the First Rule of Coding for Drupal: We do not write code for Drupal.
In the post, he also mentions the J-learning site Newspaper in a box by Mark Briggs, a guideline for starting a newspaper from scratch and without Web consulting.
Recently Portfolio.com profiled an executive of a new business start-up who described how inexpensive the cost to build a web site are:
I’ll even put numbers on it: What cost a minimum of $500,000 and took nine months and lots of engineering talent in 2004 can be done today, thanks to technology changes, by smart people with some Web awareness or the willingness to learn, for less than $20,000 in three months. It’s not that we’re doing this business on duct tape and baling wire, either. We’re working with very clean, professional services that can scale and which just a few years ago cost a hundred times as much to put in place.