One of the side effects of the current economy is that clients want to bargain with me more and usually start out their conversations by saying “I can’t afford to pay much”. What they don’t say is what “not much” means. When I ask how much they have budgeted it isn’t an attempt to find out how much I can get away with charging them its a way of finding out how much they can spend. That way I can tell them honestly what they will get for their money. At that point they have the option of saying either “Well, I really do need something more so perhaps I can add a little to the budget” or “I really don’t need anything that complicated so we’ll go with the more basic project”.
At rr.interactive I do one to two pro bono projects a year for non profits or charities and I may give a break here and there if there is nothing else going on but for the most part I have an hourly rate I have to charge in order to keep my business afloat. To charge less might have me working 24 hours a day. Considering the fact that clients are taking longer to pay and that some aren’t paying at all my work week has already extended to 7 days and my work days – well you don’t want to know about those – suffice it to say I start my day at a ridiculously early hour.
This back and forth about the cost of a website has gotten frequent enough that I have added a price range list to the contact form on my website. My feeling is that if a potential client sees that they have a choice anywhere between $500 and $20,000+ they might not be afraid to really choose the one they think is the closest. If I publish what they will usually get for that there is no question about whether they could have gotten more for less.
Here are a couple of additional thoughts:
Consider how much a client that you obtain through your website is worth? Several clients?
Compare the cost of print advertising that runs once and is usually discarded to a website that represents you 24 hours a day 7 days a week and has the capacity to represent you more fully than a print ad can. For instance a full-page ad on a local magazine costs $1500. A small business can often get a decent website for that.
Last – You really do get what you pay for. When you pay a little more for someone experienced you are paying someone who can explain and is familiar with the pros and cons of different options ranging from hosting providers to content management and shopping cart systems. We can anticipate your plan for growth and ensure you don’t have to start from the beginning when you do. We are not as likely to disappear down the road when you want changes or updates. You’ll receive regular support.
This morning I stumbled upon a site that I can’t say enough about.
This site almost achieves the vision we all had for access of documents on the web. I especially find it useful for browsing through design publications.
I have been working on customizing a shopping cart for a client recently. As part of the process I found myself redoing the buttons that came with the cart. Initially two things prompted this task. The buttons were ugly and didn’t fit the design of the clients’ site.
Now web folk don’t just fire up Photoshop when its time to make new buttons. Well maybe some do but success is in the details. A good button needs to adhere to conventions, in other words be easily recognizable as a button. Nothing frustrates a potential customer more than difficulty during checkout.
So before I redesigned the odious buttons, a task that took me several tries before I was happy, I decided to do some research.
I took screen shots of a number of different online catalog pages I particularly liked – studied the buttons and layout and color choices. I also found a wonderful article here: 107 Add to Cart Buttons of the Top Online Retailers that not only shows a wide range of examples from a number of existing and well known sites, but include statistics on terminology used – for instance Add to cart vs. Add to basket. Add to basket is more frequently seen in the UK and who would think that Buy Now suggests the shopper is finished shopping? These points are important to know.
There is almost no area of web design and development where attention to detail isn’t critically important. This is why it’s important to test on different browsers and operating systems (and get feedback from those who have a slightly different set up if you can). Fonts display differently, Colors display differently. CSS behaves differently. Ok, I’ll reword the last one for accuracy. CSS is what it is. Browsers (can) wear it differently. If you’ve ever seen 5 different people wearing the same dress you’ll know what I mean. That said compliance with standards (geek speak for more browsers getting on board so all will render the same) is getting better.
This is why exhaustive testing by end users is important.
It’s why you’ll know a site designed by pixel perfect designers.
It’s in the details
Accessibility and Standards: Why web designers consider them important and why they should be important to you.
Honestly, web designers are a geeky lot. If you strip away the creative process we give our left brains a pretty good workout. More often than not we’ll meet with a prospective client and try to sell ourselves using our knowledge of web standards and accessibility. “Your site will be built to be fully accessible and standards compliant” we’ll say and wait for the client to look as excited as we are. “Hmm, Where is the benefit to my business” they are surely thinking and “What the heck are standards and accessibility?”
Standards compliant markup means the designer has spent time developing a site using markup that will be read consistently across browsers and has stayed away from using proprietary tags or styles. This is simultaneously a line in the sand and a measure that ensures each person visiting your site will see the same content and receive the same message.
To understand why I say it is a line in the sand you need to understand a little bit of the history and rationale behind the web. Admittedly this is the probably the shortest and most dumbed down history of the Internet on the web but it should suffice.
The Internet began as the answer to the problem of sharing information over vast distances with people who would be viewing it on different computer operating systems. From the very beginning it was about sending the same message to everyone regardless of the differences between their computers. This was not an easy task but HTML was meant to standardize the display.
Initially the intent was to share scientific and scholarly information but it didn’t take long for the advertising and marketing industry to catch on to the vast potential of the Internet.
In fact it took about a nanosecond.
Marketing is essentially visual as almost all relationships start with attraction. The limits of basic html were quickly exceeded and the battle of the browsers began. Proprietary markup was introduced with each new version in the hopes that designers would design primarily for certain browsers thus gently forcing the public to adopt the “browser with the most toys”.
There are still remnants of those days. Occasionally you will stumble upon a site that says “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” but in general designers have realized that new features are best left to the standards developing bodies such as the W3C. Browser developers are expected to adhere to these standards more and more as it is clear to us that clients, designers and the public benefits.
The point is to get the same message to everyone regardless of their browser choice or their computer choice or their operating system. That always was the point.
Accessibility is essentially the same thing but it gives standards a helping hand. Even if you have done a fabulous job making your site standards compliant and every browser is rendering it the same way the individual you are trying to reach may have a hard time reading the type due to vision problems. An accessible site will allow type to be easily magnified. Try control+ or command+ depending on your browser to see this in action. Control or command- will reduce it again. An accessible site will label images and will ease the process of using a form for those who are viewing your site in a screen reader.
Building sites in this way is no longer considered an extra. It shows you are trying to reach out to all, not just some of your sites potential visitors.
And that should help your bottom line as well.
Not all ideas are good ideas and not all web sites should be built.
Now I will tell clients this – gently – and though turning down paying clients might not come naturally I’d like to think integrity can only help the long term bottom line of all.
There was a time I did my best to build what a client requested and rarely second guessed their business plan, idea or pricing structure. I’d like to think that the years spent deploying websites, watching them succeed or fail, and nurturing their growth along the way has taught me something. A few years in I was able to make recommendations that would help the client succeed but its taken me until now to flatly state “Some projects should be turned away”.
In my experience, the two most common conceptual failures appear in e-commerce projects. It’s not true that the ease of putting a storefront up on the web means you can sell anything to anybody for any price you choose.
Will customers want to purchase the product? Is the pricing structure appropriate?
These questions seem obvious yet I’m still trying to salvage a project started several years ago that was initially ill defined but once defined became ill conceived.
If I knew then what I know now I would have said no.
Now all of this naysaying does no good if you send a client away only for them to end up with another web designer/developer who won’t say no and will happily take money for a project that is going to go nowhere.
Explain, in the kindest way possible why you are turning the project away and give them at least one solid recommendation that would steer the project right.
It may help their project or their ability to evaluate other potential developers. At the very least it will be your good deed for the day.
