Because they thought web development is just hacking together html and css; and you dont need any logic but just sitting down and hacking it away! To be honest, I used to have that mindset until I got a front end developer job. It is a nightmare to get pixel perfect style on every single browsers and devices. Not to mention, when we do a simple google search we can see so much websites and people offering to do "web developing" for such a low cost.
Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you want a road-worthy production car, expect to pay on the order of $10,000.
If you want a road-worthy production car with design or features that none of the extant manufacturers have seen fit to build, expect to pay on the order of $1 billion.
The overall prices are higher, but the difference in cost is similar, and the principle basically the same.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#63I think it's partly because of blurry line between software products and programming services. Many of the software products, proprietary or open source offer massive functionality for very low cost but this is of course because the development costs have been aggregated across many customers. For example , I was asked to build an online customer management system for someone on a budget. So I googled around for open…
Just so you know, semiskilled housecleaners charge a lot more than $25 an hour. Car mechanics $60-$120 an hour. Plumbers $80-$120 an hour. When you charge $25 total for a trip to his facility, the time to understand his business problem, and an hour of setting up software for him, you are telling the client "I have no skills and am not worthy of any respect. Please abuse me."
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I…
I agree with "Security is a process, not a product." AFAIK security is important for WordPress team. There is a lot of good documentation on a project site and there are some materials from WordCamps (fe. http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress)
Latest WP "hack" via botnets was because of weak logins and passwords which are set by the users. Can you blame WP devs for that?
Speaking about upgrading; making updates easier it`s also one of the goals of the project. Also it isn`t that hard when you develop WP sites using information from WordPress Codex docs.
I hope it will get better with time, and as i wrote people are working to get things better. Sorry to hear that you are not going to recommend WordPress any longer.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#65Consider that dissonance: a website is a magic black box from the outside.
That will work to your advantage, you can skip the technical details and make it as efficient as possible. This means you should focus on selling the site as a solution to a business problem. Working out what that is, is the hard part. Many times the client has no idea and no goals.
Another advantage is the visual nature of the web. Details of what a site actually does are mostly visual elements. This means the Designer and Coder will be one in the eyes of the client, if the coder exists at all. I recently learned this lesson the hard way: I as a developer, brought on a designer friend to help with a contract. Introduced them to the client and we put in a bid. Soon, a design firm came in and took the contract, selling a design and insisting on bundling all development.
My mistake was the disconnection between designer and developer. The client doesn't know or care. Bad client? Maybe, but it seems like a common theme to me.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#66Because those stupid 1&1 adverts where you get a custom site for like £10
Yes, but an awful lot of small businesses (plumber, dog walker, restaurant, transmission shop, barber, etc) just need a basic brochure-ware site with some text, a few photos, an address, phone number and hours and maybe a contact form or hosted email. 1&1, Wix, Webs, Weebly, Wordpress.com, GoDaddy, Homestead/Intuit, Vistaprint, and probably 100 other places offer that DIY/lightly configured site offering. If that's the thing your (non-)client needs, why should they pay 100x that for something no functionally better for them? They don't want a website. They want more revenue, and they want their customers to be able to find, learn about, and choose them; a website is just a means to that end...
Disclaimer: I work for Vistaprint, who also owns Webs, and I always speak only for myself on news.yc, never for my employer.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#67I wrote my own CMS that can do a few things really well and was marketing it. Found a client and I'd been charging a client a few South African Rand every month to host a website for their business. Really low cost, in my error.
Then i started getting asked to do more work on the site.
Then they wanted a site design and they were complaining they needed more business from the site so I didnt charge. I went out of my way to redo their design, meet with them, find the correct demasque background, logo redesign and content updates.
Then another small site I was running for them at a lower cost suddenly needed changes. So I barked a bit and they backed off.
Then they came back and said that on the first website they needed more business because another channel was failing them. someone had suggested they setup a blog to get new clients. Would I help?
I replied back and said for the monthly fee I was being paid i couldnt support more work or blog integration, not at that rate. We could discuss a retainer for that kind of work...
They turfed me on both websites - Gone to someone cheaper they say that also allows them to update the website as they choose and setup a blog.. So can I give them a backup of the sites? Sure cuz it was in my terms of service.
So I thought I was doing them a favour- low costs, possibility of self maintaining the site, a new theme design, managed hosting and email.
Turfed. My wife is pissed at the time I put into them.
I on the other hand have realized this - 1. Small business dont want to pay a lot of money for anything 2. Small business dont want to pay anything for services. If you ask for payment they will balk and possibly not enter an engagement 3. Small business will want everything done, plus the clothes off your back. And when you cant anymore they'll say you suck and move on.
Im now not even marketing the web dev side of my skills anymore.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#68perhaps it is an overlap of several psychological phenomena.
1) from the look wise, a webservice indistinguishable from a page in a magazine.
2) functionality is a button, slider, or an input field, the result in the normal case, a table and often it is even for experts difficult to see the effort behind.
3) the construction of a car / bridge etc. is still somewhat understandable for outsiders, materials such as work processes are visible and understandable, programming is different here, people that never dealt with it can not see the difference between static html and data from a e.g. graph db.
4) the real effort have computers or was it servers?
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#69I think it's partly because of blurry line between software products and programming services. Many of the software products, proprietary or open source offer massive functionality for very low cost but this is of course because the development costs have been aggregated across many customers. For example , I was asked to build an online customer management system for someone on a budget. So I googled around for open…
Just so you know, semiskilled housecleaners charge a lot more than $25 an hour. Car mechanics $60-$120 an hour. Plumbers $80-$120 an hour. When you charge $25 total for a trip to his facility, the time to understand his business problem, and an hour of setting up software for him, you are telling the client "I have no skills and am not worthy of any respect. Please abuse me."
Well I didn't have to go onsite for this, or I would have definitely charged more. Though I would say that installing PHP scripts to web hosts is closer to semi-skilled labour since it can be (and frequently is) done by teenagers.
Plumbing or mechanicing have a higher barrier to entry since you usually need certifications and a significant outlay for tools/transport/premesis etc.
Re: Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Just wondering, where do you get static hosting for $3 a year?