Thoughts on Web Design

[Thor]

Just finished reading a book by Michael Gerber and in that mindset read some other material and then came across this:

When everything is the same and supply is plentiful … clients have too many choices and no basis on which to make the right choice. And when that happens, you’re a commodity. You are vanilla.

Following my other threads as I am making good progress here, I said to myself “Wow this is actually easy; anyone could do this.” Then as time passed by I realized: “Oh shiat... Anyone can do this …”

I mean today, what we do for a living is now being taught in high school.

This lead me to think, is there any hope for the lone wolf, I mean Large companies can manage to differentiate themselves through advertising and add on services etc. When I think domain names, domains.co.za/godaddy comes to mind.

When I think of hosting, I think of Hetzner—not because I use them, but because I see their ads all over the Internet.

This makes me think for the lone wolf client relationship is the only thing you have to compete on, but the flaw there is that the client dictates the cost and you wind up doing the work for that price.

Food for thought:

According to Wikipedia, commoditization is the process by which goods and services that once had economic value and distinction end up becoming simple commodities in the eyes of the market or consumers

 

[rward]

but the flaw there is that the client dictates the cost and you wind up doing the work for that price.

Only when you are not confident of yourself, your worth, and what you are providing to the client.

If you value yourself and your time then you should have no problem telling the client that you are not going to accept R 45 000 for the website you quoted them R 70 000 to develop. (Happened recently).

You have good client that are willing to pay and you have bad clients that deserve the "R 2 000 for 5 pages" gumtree ads.



Don't be afraid to turn work down.
I used to have the attitude of "can't so no - it's work/money" but now I realise that if I don't have work then I have time to do something I want to do for myself instead of someone else. The money would be nice but I am no longer willing to undervalue myself.

 

[Thor]

Only when you are not confident of yourself, your worth, and what you are providing to the client.

If you value yourself and your time then you should have no problem telling the client that you are not going to accept R 45 000 for the website you quoted them R 70 000 to develop. (Happened recently).

You have good client that are willing to pay and you have bad clients that deserve the "R 2 000 for 5 pages" gumtree ads.



Don't be afraid to turn work down.
I used to have the attitude of "can't so no - it's work/money" but now I realise that if I don't have work then I have time to do something I want to do for myself instead of someone else. The money would be nice but I am no longer willing to undervalue myself.

Here's and interesting question I've pondered over many a eons.

Let's assume I don't want to do complex websites ( ie functional type sites with databases and logic) and just want to focus on Profesional "brochure" type designs.

How do you put a place on that?

Forget about me, just take it as a general question; how do you price front end websites and what is the going rates plus minus just curious

 

[rward]

2 schools of thought:

1 - Pay per Hour:

How long is it going to take * hourly rate = Total cost

"How long is it going to take" should include your admin time (meetings, phone calls, emails, etc), dev time (include unit tests, code documentation, etc), testing time, fixing items found in testing, setup staging, fix items clients find in staging, documentation, deploy to production.

2 - Value Based

Read this: https://www.freshbooks.com/assets/other/Breaking-the-Time-Barrier.pdf

Basically - say you're creating a site for someone that sells a R 40 000 product off the site and you're confident that you can get them 5 sales a year due to the website upgrade then they shouldn't have a problem paying you R 120 000 for the site. Their investments is paid off in under a year, pretty good returns!

It all depends on how you sell it.

 

[Thor]

2 schools of thought:

1 - Pay per Hour:

How long is it going to take * hourly rate = Total cost

"How long is it going to take" should include your admin time (meetings, phone calls, emails, etc), dev time (include unit tests, code documentation, etc), testing time, fixing items found in testing, setup staging, fix items clients find in staging, documentation, deploy to production.

2 - Value Based

Read this: https://www.freshbooks.com/assets/other/Breaking-the-Time-Barrier.pdf

Basically - say you're creating a site for someone that sells a R 40 000 product off the site and you're confident that you can get them 5 sales a year due to the website upgrade then they shouldn't have a problem paying you R 120 000 for the site. Their investments is paid off in under a year, pretty good returns!

It all depends on how you sell it.

Man you are a wealth of information. I thank thee!

We should eat some sushi one day, such a knowledgeable individual. Thank you for all the insights so far.

 

[flippakitten]

Any joe off the street can hop onto one of the many "build your own site" apps and away they go.

Then you have the whole PPH type deal and undercutting your price by $20 - $30 per hour. Then taking double the time to complete the project, badly, if ever. Mostly India based "developers"... When I was still trying there.

What you have to remember there is, both those options always yield poor results for clients.
The first type, they are happy to get something that looks different to the thousands of other sites.
The second type are always unhappy when they come back and get told "I am not fixing someone else's bad work and it needs to be started from scratch" because that's exactly what it is and it would take longer to fix and cost the client more in any case.

The biggest thing though you haven't mentioned is when you work from home or yourself, you have to be extremely self driven. Get up and work, if you don't have any work, be learning or building your own product. While a lot of people can do the actual work, most of them can't motivate themselves. That's one of the biggest things.

 

[Thor]

The biggest thing though you haven't mentioned is when you work from home or yourself, you have to be extremely self driven. Get up and work, if you don't have any work, be learning or building your own product. While a lot of people can do the actual work, most of them can't motivate themselves. That's one of the biggest things.

Fully agree, I guess I left it out, because to me that is a given, if you don't have that you should not even read this thread. So fully agree that is by far the most important aspect to have.

 

[nickc]

Just to add... Yes, anyone can make a site (specifically referring to a wordpress type, with theme, throw in some content, ...). In that kind of web site creation & design, what I believe makes the biggest difference between the good and the bad is the size of the site, and the Googlability of it. Far too many of these thrown together sites are over 3MB for no good reason, with every single JS library referenced and never used, etc.

 

[Thor]

Just to add... Yes, anyone can make a site (specifically referring to a wordpress type, with theme, throw in some content, ...). In that kind of web site creation & design, what I believe makes the biggest difference between the good and the bad is the size of the site, and the Googlability of it. Far too many of these thrown together sites are over 3MB for no good reason, with every single JS library referenced and never used, etc.

To me this is the same -> My "code" and behind the scenes work I put in and organize and think is a fcking majestical experience to witness. I am an artist.

Issue I found here is that the client doesn't give a woot about what you put in.
For them nowadays it feels like they reason something like this:

Person A charges R5K for this website.
Person B charges R1 for the same site

So we go with person B

Both looks the same, but Person A's work behind the scene is of greater quality than person B, but the client doesn't care it seems.

(I am talking about the little clients here not web projects)

I am a front end person by nature. So read my posts from front-end brochure type perspective.

 

[nickc]

To me this is the same -> My "code" and behind the scenes work I put in and organize and think is a fcking majestical experience to witness. I am an artist.

Issue I found here is that the client doesn't give a woot about what you put in.
For them nowadays it feels like they reason something like this:

Person A charges R5K for this website.
Person B charges R1 for the same site

So we go with person B

Both looks the same, but Person A's work behind the scene is of greater quality than person B, but the client doesn't care it seems.

(I am talking about the little clients here not web projects)

I am a front end person by nature. So read my posts from front-end brochure type perspective.

Understood. You could almost throw in a huge single image with some image hotspots (do people still use those?!) to navigate, and it will look pretty... would be a 20MB web page, but the client wouldn't see past he prettyness.

Unfortunately the client will generally only realise (one would hope) the error in their choice, months down the line when Google refuses to go near it, and no one ever opens the site as it takes an hour to open.

I'm a Software Engineer, so this isn't really my realm, but this should shed some light on why page size/load speed is the first thing I think of.

 

[saor]

Issue I found here is that the client doesn't give a woot about what you put in.
For them nowadays it feels like they reason something like this:

Can you clearly & confidently explain to a client why what you put in is important? I think it's one of those speeches you should prepare for, always refining so that when they ask - you're ready to make a compelling argument for your services. Else you might walk away and think: "Damn - I should have said this differently / I forgot to mention xyz".

 

[flippakitten]

Understood. You could almost throw in a huge single image with some image hotspots (do people still use those?!) to navigate, and it will look pretty... would be a 20MB web page, but the client wouldn't see past he prettyness.

Unfortunately the client will generally only realise (one would hope) the error in their choice, months down the line when Google refuses to go near it, and no one ever opens the site as it takes an hour to open.

I'm a Software Engineer, so this isn't really my realm, but this should shed some light on why page size/load speed is the first thing I think of.

Image mapping is the latest craze in email marketing because they can have solid images, that are clickable and not have to worry about that pesky html and filesize stuff... Woohoo, except it never reaches the inbox because it's well, spammy but they don't care because it's what they want.

Problem is they always in the end blame you!

Also, "landing pages", how I hate them! They should be part of your site, not just a landing page that say's "Signup here to receive my spam"...

 

[nickc]

Can you clearly & confidently explain to a client why what you put in is important? I think it's one of those speeches you should prepare for, always refining so that when they ask - you're ready to make a compelling argument for your services. Else you might walk away and think: "Damn - I should have said this differently / I forgot to mention xyz".

+1 make a document of why they should choose you, explaining everything from page speed, to SEO, etc.

 

[Thor]

Understood. You could almost throw in a huge single image with some image hotspots (do people still use those?!) to navigate, and it will look pretty... would be a 20MB web page, but the client wouldn't see past he prettyness.

Unfortunately the client will generally only realise (one would hope) the error in their choice, months down the line when Google refuses to go near it, and no one ever opens the site as it takes an hour to open.

I'm a Software Engineer, so this isn't really my realm, but this should shed some light on why page size/load speed is the first thing I think of.

That is me. I would hope to be a software engineer some time in the future. But this to me is also of utmost importance I come form a background of theories and hypotheticals I am not sure what the term is in this industry, but I am a lot more concerned with best practices and scaling almost the "architecture" of websites.

I only recently started to learn how to do the physical programming ( When I say programming I mean I started dabbling in php and then I found my passion in using HTML and CSS to paint my canvas ), but I do so with the mindset of architecture the whole process. I am talking about organizing files and folders, naming conventions, optimizing delivery all the menial things I don't think person B takes into account, but the client does not see nor care for that.

 

[nickc]

Image mapping is the latest craze...

I was secretly hoping people had forgotten about that "feature". I'm sure it has it's place somewhere, but I feel dirty even mentioning it.

 

[nickc]

Not exactly related, but I thought this might lighten up the thread a bit:

 

[Thor]

Can you clearly & confidently explain to a client why what you put in is important? I think it's one of those speeches you should prepare for, always refining so that when they ask - you're ready to make a compelling argument for your services. Else you might walk away and think: "Damn - I should have said this differently / I forgot to mention xyz".

Brilliant point something I have been working on continuously is creating my supporting documents in such a matter that it highlights to a client why this matters why what you see is not necessarily what you get in this game.

 

[Thor]

Not exactly related, but I thought this might lighten up the thread a bit:

Nail meets hammer!!!

:crylaugh:

:crylaugh:

:crylaugh:

 

[Thor]

My html + php includes normally looks like this:

(This is an outdated example, but it gets the point across)

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<html>

<head>
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	<title>Portfolio | Chris Coyier</title>

	<!--[if !IE]><!-->
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.css" />
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	<!--[if gte IE 7]>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/main.css" media="screen, projection" />
	<![endif]-->

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		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://universal-ie6-css.googlecode.com/files/ie6.0.3.css" media="screen, projection" />
	<![endif]-->
</head>

<body id="home">

	<header>
		<a id="logo" href="/">Site Title</a>
		<div id="slogan">web craftsman, blogger, author, speaker</div>

		<nav>
			<?php include("inc/main-menu.php"); ?>
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	<section class="container">

		<article>
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			<img src="//chriscoyier.net/images/hipster.jpg" alt="Hipster and Company" height="120" width="570" />

			<p>You can’t dress up as a hipster for Halloween. Their attire is already so bizarre that there isn’t an
			exaggeration of it that looks like a costume. It would just look like you are another hipster about to read a poem about reading poems.</p>

			<h2>Secondary Title</h2>
			<p>Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.</p>
		</article>

		<article>
			<!-- Additional Article -->
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	</section>

	<aside>
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		<dl>
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			<dd>Monitor your sites</dd>

			<dt><a href="http://css-tricks.com">CSS-Tricks</a></dt>
			<dd>A web design community</dd>

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I love flow and using the naming Semantic Element things as much as possible

 

[Thor]

I do not believe in SEO I think it's a trendy thing hipsters sells now.

I am an advocate for BO -> Browser Optimization

In other words write good, valid code and good content and the rest follows