Edit - I didn't say you could "easily" make £500 a month. I said I could edit
The site is making a loss after you take hosting into account and the amount of hours required to bring the site up to scratch.
One of the great features of building a database site is that it is very susceptible to being hacked via sql injection exploits and so the security of the site needs to be thoroughly examined. I have hack attempts on my site every week which is why I asked if Sentinel has been installed. Which version of nuke is it and have all of the patches been installed? Hackers look for the "made by phpnuke" byline which is why I remove mine.
Secondly any coder will tell you that it's often easier to start a site from scratch than it is to try and decipher someone elses code and build on it. Bolting on a shop is easy if you know which shop to use. You choose from calloways cart, emporium, nuke royal etc. I know which I'd use from experience.
Thirdly, statistics can be very misleading. Just because a site has 1,700 members doesn't mean that they are active. Many sign up for free downloads.
They are certainly not active in the forums. By default the phpnuke option is NOT to opt in members to the mailing list so my guess is that the actual numbers belonging to the email list is in the ten to twenty range. You'd be hugely disappointed to spend 2K on a site and find only 20 opt in subscribers.
One of the first mods I made to my site was to change the default opt in status so that all new members get my newsletter.
Fourthly - if it was a plain vanilla HTML site then it would be worth more money - because the average joe with some limited coding experience and Dreamweaver could build on the site
Lastly I'm not being insulting. My time is more valuable to me than rectifying a loss making site. However to Chris, as a student, his time would be well spent learning how to make his site into a traffic monster.
Oh and I forgot - I spent weeks learning how mod_rewrite works so that I could make those pretty, google friendly HTML files generated on the fly and I did this because google wouldn't index url's like this properly
http://www.casemodworld.com/modules.php?name=How_To&rop=showcontent3&id=4
But loves this:
http://www.storebuilder.co.uk/content-196.html
If I was buying potential then I would simply register another domain name. A domain name has potential.
Any investment has to be properly researched and the only reason I was interested was because I know about this stuff - if it was an ASP site then I wouldn't have any interest whatsoever.
Plus I don't have any interest in Case modding so how would I add new content? I only build sites that I have an interest in the subject.
So I just talked myself out of buying this - :shock: