August 17, 2004
Furious About Low-Balling
It pisses me off to no end when I see people offering web design services for obscenely cheap prices.
The other day I got a mail from an old web host announcing:
"For $15 you can get your own customized web site. They will do everything for you from scratch, from layout, to concept, to logo design and 3d artwork."
WTF! How in the hell can you seriously provide a customized website from scratch for $15! How can anyone make any money with this business model! ARGH! Even if the website only took 3 hours to make, the company only makes $5 an hour. That's not even minimum wage.
Need to take a few deep breaths, let reality come back into focus. And the reality is this company is a farce. It won't survive simply because there isn't any way to make money in low-balling hard work. However, the real danger is how this type of advertisement continues to reinforce the belief that web design is cheap.
Hard Work
I just spent the better part of a day and a half converting an ambitious graphic design composition into an ecommerce engine homepage. That's almost 12 hours of markup and styling for one page. I like to think I'm not alone in the time it takes to build a good, solid, standards based web page. That's honest hard work as far as I'm concerned. There is no way I could, or would, build a website for $15, not even if I just sliced up a graphic in Image Ready and put it on the web.
Before you say it, yes, I know the old story of how its going to be a long struggle to gain respectability and understanding about web development/design as a profession. I get it, and I'm ready for the challenge. But isn't our job hard enough already without some ambitious punks reducing the value of web design to the price of a few Happy Meals?
I guess what really gets me is some poor, unsuspecting person is going to buy this service, thinking its a great deal. But just like working with a bad contractor on your house, eventually the customer will have to spend a whole lot more cleaning up whatever mess these guys built. Thats tantamount to fraud, and there's literally nothing that can be done.
Or is there? Any ideas?
- Posted in:
- Business of Web
Comments
1
Neardark:
I fear this will always be this way --and yes, it does exist in well-established indudustries, like home construction. Perhaps we need a Better Business Bureau -like outfit to help people choose quality Internet content designers. Maybe there already is such a thing, like the graphics artist guild that provides such a service.
Or I guess we need to market our services just to audiences that understands the value of quality design.
J
Posted: August 17, 2004 at 11:43 PM MT
2
Sean:
You know I was thinking the same thing right after I wrote this.
A group of people, 3rd party along the lines of Consumer Reports. The trouble comes in trying to identify criteria for such a report. Does anyone know how established professions like Advertising handles this (if they do at all)?
Posted: August 18, 2004 at 12:15 PM MT
3
david:
I disagree -- it is entirely possible to build a basic website in under an hour, after all. And the "low-ballers" are a wonderful counter-weight to the rip-off artists who build websites for thousands of dollars, right?
Posted: October 11, 2004 at 1:40 PM MT
4
Sean:
David,
You are correct, it is possible to build simply a website, few pages, limited to no focused graphic design in less than an hour.
Now that is assuming of course that you have:
And that's just the basics. On top of that would be any number of possibilities in service, training, content, etc. Which is exactly what the $15 website offer above purports. And frankly, to get that setup for $15 is at best working for $5/hour, and that's not even minimum wage.
I'm a firm believer that you get what you pay for in life, and usually a $1,000 website is usually worth it and a $15 website is usually trash.
You're a blogger and I assume you set up your own site, what would you charge someone to setup a site like yours?
Posted: October 13, 2004 at 8:22 PM MT