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Don't be a guinea pig…
Without a doubt, your website is one of your most important marketing tools. You need to work with a company that has demonstrated experience in technology and marketing to ensure that you get the best value for money. Working with beginners simply puts in the position of paying them to learn at your expense.
There are far too many small businesses within Australia who have unwittingly been the victim of inexperienced web designers, who have used them as guinea pigs to try and learn how to build websites.
Unlike most other industries there are no regulations or standards. Unsuspecting business people talk to a web design company and expect that they will know what they are doing. In many cases even with degrees, web designers have never built the systems they try to sell.
A classic case is with catalogues and e-commerce sites. I have met people who have paid over $8,000 to a web design company who lead them to believe they had built a site like this before – they hadn't. Eight thousand is a lot of money to pay someone for them to learn their trade. Sadly the website only intermittently works and they can't find what is wrong with it. Meanwhile the customer is losing business and credibility. Who wants to buy online at a site that only occasionally works? All the money spent on advertising the website has largely been wasted.
Having said that, the experience gained has certainly helped the web development company, they have learnt a lot and have been paid for it. Using people as guinea pigs is rife in the IT industry.
Make sure you see the sites that the web developer you chose, has built. It is not good enough that they have worked on other products – you don't know who did what. You need to work with someone who knows what they are doing; otherwise it will cost you money.
It would be funny if it didn't cost small businesses so much money. There is no other industry where you go to someone and they charge you while they learn their skills. Most people learn while under the watchful eye of someone who knows what they are doing.
You wouldn't get me taking my car to someone to learn how things worked or an electrician to just “have a go”. Even the guys with degrees have not had commercial experience and in my opinion that should be within larger companies. They can afford to train the graduate and let them learn a bit more. Small businesses can't afford the cost to pay for their mistakes while they learn.
With all the fancy website development packages today and the free code that you can download from the web, it can look to these beginners like the project should be simple. I have met fellows about to undertake these projects and their thinking while scary, is very reflective of the cowboy approach.
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“It can't be that difficult. After all we can get some free catalogue code from here and I have already downloaded a free content management system. All we need to do is hook them up to online payment and then build the interface. We should do OK on this job”.
The problem is that they have brought a Holden motor to fit into a ford chassis. The running gear is Toyota and the electrical came from a Hyundai. While they all work very well when they are professionally fitted to the cars, they are designed to work in simply coupling them together is not an easy task.
Even worse, the cowboys don't realise how much trouble they are in until they are knee deep into the project and there is no easy way out. They have taken and spent a large chunk of the money. They have to some how make it work together.
That is the sad reality of many websites and I know there will be hundreds of people reading this article who say that is exactly what happened to me. I hear the same story over and over again.
My advice...
a) Do your homework. Ask to see at least ten websites that their company has built. Look to see if the company's logo is on the bottom of all the sites to ensure they really have been built by that company.
Quick but funny story: I recently advertised for a graphic designer. We had 120 applicants so we began sorting. We always check to see their work. We had two candidates tell us that they had designed the same website. I am not sure who had really designed it and as neither of their work was suitable, we did not pursue it. My point is you need to be sure that the guys you are talking to have previously built a site like you need before.
If they haven't then either don't use them or negotiate a fee reflective of your status as a guinea pig in their learning process.
b) Try to use the websites that they have built. If they are hard to use, cumbersome or don't work properly, there are some loud warning bells ringing.
c) Ensure they are giving you a system that you can update yourself. Don't get stuck with obsolete technology that is going to cost you a fortune. Remember, 90% of website companies make 90% of their money through fees for website updates and changes.
It might look cheap now, but what will it really cost you. I was chatting with a lady. She was bragging about how her company had spent only $3,000 for their website. I asked her if she kept it up to date and could she do this herself or was she paying the company.
She said they “updated it monthly and these updates had cost $9,000 over the last 12 months”. They were “very surprised by how much it cost for even simple changes to the website”.
d) Get a fixed price for the development. Again it is common for me to meet people who have been quoted $5,000 to build their site and it ends up costing them $13,000. In fact I have met people where the site has gone from a $6,000 quote and ended up costing $27,000 before they began court action to recover some of the money.
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A fixed price quotation will give you a better understanding of what you are really going to pay. Having said that, you need to see a similar site so that you can understand what functionality will be included. Otherwise you will simply keep paying for what you thought you were already getting.
Conclusion
The message is simple. In all other trades, we do our homework and check out whom we are using. You need to be especially diligent on the Internet. It is easy for people to talk technical so that it sounds to you that they know what they are talking about. Do your homework.
There are more cowboys in the web, Internet and IT space that you can possibly imagine. Don't put any credence on a degree or other qualifications. You need to see specific sites that their company has built; otherwise you need to pay a rate reflective of the headache that you are about to endure.
Remember, you are going to put in at least twice as much time, energy and effort working with a web development company that does not know what it is doing. So you need to budget that into your cost and negotiate a rate accordingly.
In my opinion, you will do much better using a professional company that knows what it is doing. A good quality website, some information about search engine optimisation and you can be making money while the guys using the cowboys are still out in the back field playing with the technology.
At the end of the day, it's all about results.....
Click here to contact an award winning team or call 1300 886 859
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