If you present it as a commodity, they will treat it as such. "A website" is a thing. "A tailored solution to help your business do X" is not.
Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#22Why they're shocked isn't worth getting into really at first: The first question is, are they even able to get that sort of budget together. Then the second question is, what sorts of things are available for budgets they can muster up, and what are the constraints on said things.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#23I'd strongly suspect you're working with smaller to mid-sized businesses — or maybe just individuals.
I've done a ton of work for smaller outfits, and the fact is that whatever you're billing is coming directly out of their own wallet, or close to it. Imagine the shock when the mechanic says you need to spend $2,500 on a new transmission. That's what your clients feel.
That's also why I've turned away smaller projects for the past year. Everything becomes a never-ending, underpaying project from hell where you end up doing little tweaks for free because you're a nice guy/gal. You also end up competing with joker developers with lower rates who will probably do a hack job (the fight of "doing it cheap" vs "doing it right" is timeless on the small business front).
My point: If your clients are shocked and opting not to do work with you, find bigger clients. If bigger clients won't work with you, lower your rate and find smaller clients.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#24Because web development is easy. Why would I pay so much when you sit on the computer for a few hours pressing buttons. It requires nowhere near as much skill as say.. A builder. /s
Are you kidding? Web development is not just "pressing buttons". Get back to your Joomla or Wordpress site and think again before you post.
Maybe I was too optimistic in people's ability to notice blatant sarcasm haha
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#25If you present it as a commodity, they will treat it as such. "A website" is a thing. "A tailored solution to help your business do X" is not.
I remember early on in my web development career to make sure you are selling a service not a product. You aern't building a website - you are providing a marketing service, requiring expert advice and a component of that service is building a website. As people have said, websites are easy - Wordpress + theme + hour of time and you are done.
Sell your knowledge of digital marketing - SEO, Adwords, etc in order to drive sales for your client, which is ultimately the reason they want a website in the first place.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#26Because a wordpress[1] site with a $20 template is all most small businesses need for their brochureware site. The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application. The only reason the majori…
On the flipside, sometimes building something custom allows you to help the client focus on what makes their business unique.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#27@rbsn
I don`t know how much do you charge hourly, but i`ll assume that it`s fair price for a job done. If it is so, maybe your clients are cheapskates? There is a trend in thinking (especially within small business owners or managers) that good "website" is easy to make and there is a lot of people who can do it. I would agree with the second, but not the first. Usually after one or two bigger failed projects wise firms learn price to quality ratio. There rest are cheapskates that must be avoided ;)
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#28I'd strongly suspect you're working with smaller to mid-sized businesses — or maybe just individuals. I've done a ton of work for smaller outfits, and the fact is that whatever you're billing is coming directly out of their own wallet, or close to it. Imagine the shock when the mechanic says you need to spend $2,500 on a new transmission. That's what your clients feel. That's also why I've turned away smaller project…
@katzgrau
I also agree with that opinion. I think it could be extrapolated to making sth for money in general.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#29Because a wordpress[1] site with a $20 template is all most small businesses need for their brochureware site. The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application. The only reason the majori…
I cut my teeth building wordpress/drupal brochure sites for small businesses. I have inherited custom web sites for these customers who got duped by some punk developer who didn't feel like using an established solution. I want to punch all developers in the mouth who think a custom application for this type of situation is a good idea. They give us all a bad name and exacerbate the cost problem.
I want to smack all the developers and designers who think Wordpress is "good enough". It's not. It's an unmaintainable mess. Every client-run Wordpress site I touch is disgustingly out of date and everything added since the first design looks like crayon drawings done by five-year olds with ADD. I don't see much Drupal in the wild so I can't comment on that.
Web development has not reached the state where non-technical end users can maintain websites. In theory, sure, in practice, there's tons of money to be made fixing hacked sites and cleaning up years of technical debt.
I would not recommend Wordpress for anything other than a simple blog. Do anything else with it, you need a developer on staff. And a simple blog will never be enough for the needs of a small business.
I'd much rather work on some 90s-era custom-built app than the vast majority of brutally hacked together Wordpress sites.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#30Because a wordpress[1] site with a $20 template is all most small businesses need for their brochureware site. The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application. The only reason the majori…
Until they insist on using the email service that is packaged with the shared hosting plan.
And they, or an unwitting employee, start using it to communicate information they shouldn't.
And their account gets owned. (Keep in mind, the content is no longer just public web pages...)
And... Even if the web site hosting should have been done this way, they still needed help/advice/pressure to be more clueful about their IT deployment and use.
A lot of small businesses look for the minimum and think things should just work.
Separately, as a favor, I spent a weekend cleaning such a business's systems after an employee clicked on a malicious attachment.
When I told them what that service was worth (particularly on short notice and over a weekend) -- mind you, I wasn't charging them anything, just trying to put the fear of God into them to prevent a repeat and to motivate some better policy and behavior -- they completely balked. One partner "called someone" and claimed a simple sub $100 scan with a packaged product would have taken care of the problem. (Never mind that they had multiple infections on multiple machines and a raft of outdated products presenting serious security implications.)
They were in a cash flow crisis. If I hadn't had billing up by Monday morning, they would have been severely screwed. Yet, they were unwilling to assign any significant dollar amount to what I'd done.
The other side of businesses that pay too much for custom web development, is businesses that treat their IT systems like a consumer-level Windows XP box. And we know what happens to those.
P.S. IT, IS... whichever acronym floats your boat.