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Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

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Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#51

Post by habosa »

brokentone wrote: post #19

I can't think of another good or service with this much variety in price or opacity in what you get. For small projects, you're talking free or $10ish for an open CMS + theme to maybe $10K for custom stuff. That's a 1000x difference (and maybe little discernable difference to the client). If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really…

This is the best answer I've seen. It's impossible for non-technical people to see the difference between a custom website where you wrote ever character of the HTML/CSS/Whatever by hand and a Wordpress.com website with a beautiful theme for $20. Even more so, it's hard for them to see that once you want to add a single feature or two that don't fit the Wordpress mold, you're likely to have to go from-scratch for the entire website and charge 100x what they were previously paying.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#52

Post by _mpf »

vinceguidry wrote: post #44
mpclark wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress is excellent, and there are some mighty big WP sites out there. You're barking up the right tree when you say "you need a developer on staff" though. Web sites are not just "set and forget" deals. They need continuing care and maintenance. And the whole idea of having a site that the receptionist can take care of on a Friday afternoon, which I have found pervasive in small businesses, has just never really…

Wordpress sucks for small business. It's just that simple. It shouldn't, but it does.

Small business needs an easy CMS whereby staff can do most of the tasks without present "IT Crowd". AFAIK WordPress gets it done (with some minor problems - as you wrote fe. updating is a problem for non-technical people and WordPress haves no MVC, so it`s easy to go spaghetti way with the code). WordPress devs are trying to resolve problems which are most voted within the community.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#53

Post by DanBC »

People don't have any clue about what's involved. They maybe have had some printwork done on the cheap before, and see this as similar.

And when I say they don't have a clue about what's involved you need to remember that many people can't plug in a printer. They have no idea about 300 dpi or 75 dpi or low quality jpegs or cross browser ("I click 'the internet' and there it is") or HTML or CSS or anything else.

But this is perhaps an opportunity! (A painful opportunity that's possibly full of woe, but still).

You create 5 mini sites of varying levels of complexity. You start with totally passive, html & css only, no updates, few images. You then build up, including tiny bits of dynamic content (roll-overs, javascript) all the way up to full content management. You describe how many hours of work are needed to create each of these, you show examples of wireframes. You also describe the design decisions the client would need to make ("Will your content change once a year? Your best choice is X But if you will add content once a week your best choice is Y").

You then give tentative costings. You make sure they're labeled as tentative and subject to change because of work involved.

You invite potential customers to talk to you about what they need.

Hopefully this will filter out people who have wildly wrong ideas about the costs or times, and will encourage people who want a website but who were too baffled to ask.

Of course, there are many risks of dealing with totally naive clients and it could be hellish.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#54

Post by nateguchi »

learc83 wrote: post #49
keenerd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this is why I usually set my smallest clients up with a static html generator. (At least if they don't want comments, and then we consider Disqus before wordpress.) It is really hard to have vulerabilities with static html. Similarly, hosting these costs nothing. Usually in the ballpark of $3/year, the DNS alone is the dominate cost. And if they do get a sudden inrush of traffic, static hosts need to see a…

Clients left to their own devices can eventually destroy anything . I had a client who wanted a static site, but at the last minute decided they needed a "news" sidebar on every page that they could update. This was before any of the off the shelf solutions existed (to mixing static and dynamic content), so I wrote some javascript (before jquery made ajax easy) that grabbed the content from a flat file. Long story sh…

I'd love to see this!

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#55

Post by vinceguidry »

_mpf wrote: post #43
vinceguidry wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Wordpress that's the issue, it's with the current state of the problem domain. People want websites that they don't have to pay a programmer to maintain. Wordpress solved this for blogging , but using it for anything else and not having technical talent on call makes for a giant mess.

Yes, exactly - it`s not a problem with tool, but with use of it. I also wouldn`t recommend using any software without knowledge how it behaves and what can be done with it.

What you're essentially saying here is that only programmers should have websites. This is not a good attitude. Like saying only mechanics should own cars. We need to change the technology, make it more accessible, not just say that only the technically savvy should use technology.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#56

Post by vinceguidry »

_mpf wrote: post #52
vinceguidry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress sucks for small business. It's just that simple. It shouldn't, but it does.

Small business needs an easy CMS whereby staff can do most of the tasks without present "IT Crowd". AFAIK WordPress gets it done (with some minor problems - as you wrote fe. updating is a problem for non-technical people and WordPress haves no MVC, so it`s easy to go spaghetti way with the code). WordPress devs are trying to resolve problems which are most voted within the community.

They're not minor problems. Please don't underestimate the epidemic of hacked sites that are a direct result of end-user unwillingness to upgrade and possibly break their site. This is a problem that can't be solved without significant architectural changes. Customers are more willing to risk getting their websites pwned than to risk an upgrade that may take their site down, so upgrades often aren't done for years.

It's not a small problem, its a huge one, and the primary reason why I can no longer recommend Wordpress.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#57

Post by Paradigma11 »

brokentone wrote: post #19

I can't think of another good or service with this much variety in price or opacity in what you get. For small projects, you're talking free or $10ish for an open CMS + theme to maybe $10K for custom stuff. That's a 1000x difference (and maybe little discernable difference to the client). If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really…

Maybe use the car analogy. How much does a customized (length, width) version of a given model cost that fits better in your garage?

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#58

Post by _mpf »

vinceguidry wrote: post #55
_mpf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly - it`s not a problem with tool, but with use of it. I also wouldn`t recommend using any software without knowledge how it behaves and what can be done with it.

What you're essentially saying here is that only programmers should have websites. This is not a good attitude. Like saying only mechanics should own cars. We need to change the technology, make it more accessible, not just say that only the technically savvy should use technology.

No, i`ve tried to say that WordPress is simple enough (for a non-technical person after a short training) to deal with the majority of tasks. I don`t know easier open source CMS comparable to WordPress.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#59

Post by rbsn »

habosa wrote: post #51
brokentone wrote: post #19

I can't think of another good or service with this much variety in price or opacity in what you get. For small projects, you're talking free or $10ish for an open CMS + theme to maybe $10K for custom stuff. That's a 1000x difference (and maybe little discernable difference to the client). If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really…

This is the best answer I've seen. It's impossible for non-technical people to see the difference between a custom website where you wrote ever character of the HTML/CSS/Whatever by hand and a Wordpress.com website with a beautiful theme for $20. Even more so, it's hard for them to see that once you want to add a single feature or two that don't fit the Wordpress mold, you're likely to have to go from-scratch for the…

Going beyond the design and layout to actually writing a website for the client using Rails for example, how can you explain this? Unfortunately, clients have no idea about the technology behind what they actually see on their screen. The server side application and database which makes it all possible.

Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?

#60

Post by nnq »

habosa wrote: post #51
brokentone wrote: post #19

I can't think of another good or service with this much variety in price or opacity in what you get. For small projects, you're talking free or $10ish for an open CMS + theme to maybe $10K for custom stuff. That's a 1000x difference (and maybe little discernable difference to the client). If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really…

This is the best answer I've seen. It's impossible for non-technical people to see the difference between a custom website where you wrote ever character of the HTML/CSS/Whatever by hand and a Wordpress.com website with a beautiful theme for $20. Even more so, it's hard for them to see that once you want to add a single feature or two that don't fit the Wordpress mold, you're likely to have to go from-scratch for the…

Indeed. Any idea about how to explain to non-technical people what this difference is? This is the kind of question I'd like answered.

(Otoh, concerning WP, you can, unfortunately, fit almost anything into the WP mold, or "around" it - at least when you are past the point of having read and understood most of its source code and you know the db layout by heart... yeah, it's terrible and the whole thing works against you if you want to write good, clean, testable code, but it still ends up the cheapest option you can give to a client if you want to be honest with him)

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