If there is something that you can rely on when working in a service based industry is that relatively early on in a sales process a potential client will ask that all important question "how much is this going to cost?". If you are really unlucky, this will be one of the first questions you get, which makes things quite interesting because your service is going to be judged mainly on cost.
If you were to come to me for a website and asked me how much a website was going to cost, and I replied "£150,000", most people would find this extortionate, yes?
What then if you had the gift of foresight and would see that by spending that money your business would make £500,000 in the coming year? Is that price extortionate now?
A common mistake that a service based business can make in these situations is attempt to tackle the issue of price at the outset. By acknowledging price you are entering into negotiations that can be tackled after the value of the service is established. In offering a service, your talents are used to help your customers achieve their ambitions, these services require time, dedication and expertise and are valuable. In most cases, the price of a service reflects the value of the work, by negotiating price you in fact establishing two things; that your services weren't priced correctly in the first place and that the value of your product isn't as rewarding.
All bloggers should have a sabbatical...
Installing the stumbleupon toolbar and hitting the stumble button has been both an insight and a curse as I've got thoroughly addicted to stumbling sites that other people have found. As a social networking/web 2.0 application, stumbleupon has been a phenomena in the simplicity of it's idea yet it's genius in understanding the complexities of social interaction and human curiosity. It's been one of those things that I have understood more the more that I have participated, and I have genuinely been intrigued by the humour, style and creativity of the sites that people find.
On a stumbling session I will find usually a smattering of decent humour, well designed sites and inspirational artwork that I wouldn't have normaly found if this facility wasn't available. However, there is the very rare circumstance when you find something that is truely remarkeable that mere words can't describe. Pure luck of hitting the stumble button found myself looking at A Mother's Journey a photographic masterpiece following the traumatic events of a childs final months battling cancer. It is no wonder that this work won a pullitzer as the energy and emotions are captured so vividly and dramatically. It is hard to not be touched by looking at these photographs and following a journey that some would say is the hardest a person can take.
It is nice to be reminded that there is a human touch to working on the web sometimes and I for one feel better for knowing and sharing such important sites like this and being reminded that the internet is not all about cool widgets and clever designs.
What do you think is the greatest obstacle to a professional web designer. Believe it or not, but up there at the top, one of the biggest hurdles that I face when pitching to a company about corporate web work is the already incumbent web designer who currently does that company's online work. Not altogether surprising, but then you wouldn't realise how many corporate web sites are made and maintained by someone who know's someone whose son is a web designer. Knowing a web designer isn't necessarily a bad thing, I do sites for friends and relatives for mates rates and help them out. What I am getting at with business sites relates to what luke says in our work blog about the cheap alternative proving more expensive in the long run.
The thing is, is that web designers are like builders, there are lot’s of them at varying degrees of standard and everyone knows ‘a friend of a friend’ who is one. Just because you know someone who’s cousin’s, friend’s, brother’s, bank accountant’s sister is a web designer and can probably get you a good deal, doesn't make it the right decision to choose that person. Cost rarely is a good decision in getting professional services. The real decision in today's world is what that person can achieve with the site that they create. With WYSIWYG programmes and off the shelf sites it really is simple for anyone to be a 'web designer'. However, with only limited knowledge of online marketing, social media, search engine optimisation etc. the cheap alternative is not altogether the most advantageous.
Coming a close second to the 'bedroom' site designed by the managing directors cousin, the other main competition I encounter is the "professionaly designed" site from a web design company. How many business sites today are created with state of the art content management systems, flash sites and glitzy graphics only to prove unwieldy, unmanageable and totaly inneffective for the purposes of the business it is aimed at serving? Quite a few.
To give an example of such a costly web mistake, I have seen tens of thousands of pounds spent on content management systems for companies whose sites don't bring in any business. To add to this, the company's that pay for this, rarely have the need to update their site catalogues or site structure to warrant a content management system in the first place. If you take into account what I said in my last post about measuring return on investment in webdesign then these companies are wasting money foolishly.
The two pitfalls a company can fall into in creating a web site is that of cost. On one hand, there is the designer who focuses on cost and saving money and on the other hand there is the other designer who smells profit and focuses on selling you a site that is all singing and dancing. Neither of these sites focuses on what should be at the heart of any web project, the ultimate goal of the site and it's return on investment.
Generally speaking, I always think that if you make in direct attributable revenue from a web site the amount you put in to create it then that is a positive return on investment. A naive way of looking at it, and I can't say that I spend vast amounts of time calculating monetary value from a web site, but if your intention is to make money online then that I think is the minimum goal. Anything extra, of course is then profit.
This is quite simple if you are selling directly to someone because the measure of success is purely monetary in nature. The difficulty of course in measuring ROI is when either the product is too complex to sell via the internet or requires alternative methods of communication. What prompted me to write about this is due to a website I created for my brother in law who has started up a tree and garden business in Carmarthen. The site I created for him is simple, I didn't charge him and I spent the odd hours here and there doing it, and to tell you the truth it is no where near finished. Yet since it has been up, he has procured three jobs that would have covered the creation of a medium sized e-commerce site. Now, he knows that the phone calls have come via interest in the web site because he doesn't have any other form of marketing... and they told him that they called him after seeing his web site. Were he to have an alternative method of direct marketing then that phone call is more difficult to trace (other than asking outright where the caller has arrived from).
Harder still is when you are selling complex products like the company I work for, which sells CRM and sales management systems. The greater the investment the longer and more complex the process from sales prospect to close of deal. The corporate site may be one of many factors that a person may encounter in the build up to a sale from enquiring into products, costs and personell. They may visit several times over a period of months, but one thing is certain it is difficult to assess how much the site has played in the process. It is conceivable that they might not have resulted in your product if they had not seen your web site, certainly this is true if they first found you through organic search, but also even if they hadn't, it is also conceivable that if subsequent to a face to face meeting a prospect might visit your site to re-enforce knowledge and further research your products. The corporate site evidently fills different roles and must meet the expectation of every stage of a prospective sales process, but your site may not directly make any money. However, that doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile investment.
So, how do you calculate ROI? In my opinion this is not the right question. What should be asked is how do you calculate the loss of not having an effective web site? And by effective, I mean any way that you would gain any advantage on the web, be it a useful contact, exposure to different markets or just a central resource for existing clients. Take away that site and you open up the opportunity of the web world finding your competitor and having another option other than the one they would have had if they found you.
Let me give you a little insight into what happens when someone asks about webdesign. Most people today have a web site, especially businesses, so the majority of corporate web work that I get professionaly is companies that have existing web sites. Now, this might seem obvious, but a webdesigner when they get an opportunity to critique a current web site is always going to look for problems in design and coding that he can exploit if you like, the opportunity of getting work. This is natural, and before you take offense to the word "exploit", the difference between an objective critique and an "rob you blind" critique is all about ethics not motive. Every web designer/developer is out to gain business, the difference between some is that they can justify the need to change or rework a site through necessity not just cosmetically.
I for instance will look for tell tale signs of 'old fashioned' design, for instance the over reliant use of tables or javascript making the code of the website run like a monk reading the magna carta. My boss has a particular bug-bear and will always look for 'mailto' tags and then invariably sigh in disgust as all too often he finds them. He alludes to it in his blog article on 'business web design' and the point we are really looking for is whether the current design is relevant and can handle the rigours of modern day business objectives.
'Mailto' tags have been around since the middle ages of webdesign and are an archaic form of contacting someone that is tantamount to waving ones arms, jumping up and down and requesting the spamming world to supply you with a lifetimes supply of viagra, with a side order of plastic surgery for various appendages. If a site has this as a part of it's web strategy (and you will be surprised how many have) what hope have you in the rest of the design. Similarly, there are still sites (and I mean business sites, not personal) who grin and impressively show off their brand new site designed in flash. I design flash sites as part of my portfolio, but I don't do many, and if I do I expressly make sure the client knows exactly what they are getting into and that they are in effect making themselves blind to search engines. In fact I make it a priority that I will not design a site in flash unless a client definitely isn't bothered about search engine optimisation. For a business site, flash is a no-no of the highest order.
Basics I know, but you will be surprised at how many people are still getting sites designed like this...
