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A clever way to fight IE6

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Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#101

Post by jemfinch »

umjames wrote: post #74
redorb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q:"sure you'll make a ton of money, but is that what you want?" A: "yes, that will be fine."

I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times. The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't…

Do people really go into web design to get "fuck you" money?

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#102

Post by jdminhbg »

kenjackson wrote: post #99
prawn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run a small web-dev business for 12 years and regret every time I've dropped my price to lock in a job.

Then you've dropped too low. You certainly don't do it for $1. But I've found that whenever there are other companies with ideological bents (like anti-IE6) I can almost certainly always crush them economically and with respect to quality.

That's fine, but I (a hypothetical web designer) am selecting for clients who don't actually care to do IE6 compatibility work, but would try to get it if it were the same price.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#103

Post by prawn »

kenjackson wrote: post #99
prawn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run a small web-dev business for 12 years and regret every time I've dropped my price to lock in a job.

Then you've dropped too low. You certainly don't do it for $1. But I've found that whenever there are other companies with ideological bents (like anti-IE6) I can almost certainly always crush them economically and with respect to quality.

Competing aggressively on price, more often than not, attracts a certain type of client. If you're taking the cheap option now, you'll often fight over every cent going forward and be pretty miserable to work with.

If someone is desperate for work, they might need to make sacrifices to keep busy. I'm not, so I try not to.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#104

Post by kenjackson »

prawn wrote: post #103
kenjackson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you've dropped too low. You certainly don't do it for $1. But I've found that whenever there are other companies with ideological bents (like anti-IE6) I can almost certainly always crush them economically and with respect to quality.

Competing aggressively on price, more often than not, attracts a certain type of client. If you're taking the cheap option now, you'll often fight over every cent going forward and be pretty miserable to work with. If someone is desperate for work, they might need to make sacrifices to keep busy. I'm not, so I try not to.

It's not all that aggressive. If your intention is to effectively price out technology X (IE6), I can almost always beat your price by a good mile, and I'll make a point of it.

With that said, I don't do web development :-)

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#105

Post by prawn »

kenjackson wrote: post #104
prawn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competing aggressively on price, more often than not, attracts a certain type of client. If you're taking the cheap option now, you'll often fight over every cent going forward and be pretty miserable to work with. If someone is desperate for work, they might need to make sacrifices to keep busy. I'm not, so I try not to.

It's not all that aggressive. If your intention is to effectively price out technology X (IE6), I can almost always beat your price by a good mile, and I'll make a point of it. With that said, I don't do web development :-)

We'd be going after different markets. The shops trying to beat a price by a mile are in a lower tier.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#106

Post by kenjackson »

prawn wrote: post #105
kenjackson wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not all that aggressive. If your intention is to effectively price out technology X (IE6), I can almost always beat your price by a good mile, and I'll make a point of it. With that said, I don't do web development :-)

We'd be going after different markets. The shops trying to beat a price by a mile are in a lower tier.

I think you underestimate the huge price differentials for almost no difference in quality. In fact often quote the opposite. I've seen a factor of 5x in price difference in some cases with virtually no difference in portfolio, mockups, or code quality.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#107

Post by jfb »

jemfinch wrote: post #101
umjames wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times. The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't…

Do people really go into web design to get "fuck you" money?

Not smart people.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#108

Post by grackle »

MJR wrote: post #26

Many users of IE6 have no choice of browser. It's either IE6 or nothing. They're forced to use it because many large companies have IE6 as they're single browser on the desktop. Forcing an upgrade of all the clients in a company to IE7, 8, or another browser can be a large effort. The end users have zero control to upgrade their own browser or install other software. An upgrade also requires that all internal applica…

Thank you. Thank you so much for articulating this.

I'd like to add that historical site analytics should always be a factor in the web developer's decision to support IE6 or not - and in my experience, B2B companies almost always have 40+ percent of users still on IE6.

Yes, we all want IE6 to die. Yes, it makes life harder for us in the development community.

But telling a client that "you can save money on your website if we ignore IE6" is inherently disingenuous, unless your client is already a web technologies expert (and if they're outsourcing web development, I'm doubting that this is the case). Nine times out of ten, the client will jump on the cost-saving opportunity, you will avoid the hassle of developing for backwards compatibility, and you'll feel good for having just stabbed IE6 in the kidney. But when the client's site analytics say that 40% of the customer base is still on IE6 (and this is typical in my experience) then you'll be costing them FAR more in lost business than you'll be saving them in web development costs.

I hate IE6 too... but there's more to it than just the added cost of development - and as stated earlier, many users simply don't have a choice in the matter.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#109

Post by aberkowitz »

dkarl wrote: post #63
edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

Subcontract the IE6 compatibility work to someone who doesn't know how much you're charging for it.

"[Your favorite economically impoverished country here], home of IE6 compatibility."

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#110

Post by flannell »

VMG wrote: post #52
flannell wrote: post #50

I think we should remember why IE6 continues to burden us. All those companies spending millions adding Citrix and MS Terminal services to their network many years ago need a few more to get their ROI back. In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops. I develop a web based app and it's a nightmare adding those awful ha…

In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops. You assume that it is the decision of the IT department. I would imagine that the IT department would have less headaches by updating

I don't mean the IT department upgrading their own computers, they probably already done so, I mean as a company. If they run an old citrix or MS TS then they're locked into XP. I've seen this first hand. A lot of global companies haven't upgraded to the latest version and continue to run Software that even Microsoft no longer supports!
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