The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application.
The only reason the majority of small businesses think they need custom functionality is because they don't know enough to know what they're really trying to do. Try to listen to what the client wants to accomplish, not how they want to accomplish it, and see if you can come up with an off the shelf solution to their problems (or refer them to someone else who can).
Think about all those times someone on stackoverflow asks how to do something in a really roundabout way that seems wrong. The first question you ask is "what are you trying to accomplish?" Most of the time there is a simpler way to do it.
Edit:
[1] When I say wordpress, I mean wordpress/drupal/cushycms not just wordpress. Basically anything where you're not charging the client to build a custom blog/CMS engine, or charging $2k for a custom design.
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 IT deployment and use.
A lot of small businesses look for the minimum and think things should just work.
Separately, as a favor, I spent a weekend cleaning such a business's systems after an employee clicked on a malicious attachment.
When I told them what that service was worth (particularly on short notice and over a weekend) -- mind you, I wasn't charging them anything, just trying to put the fear of God into them to prevent a repeat and to motivate some better policy and behavior -- they completely balked. One partner "called someone" and claimed a simple sub $100 scan with a packaged product would have taken care of the problem. (Never mind that they had multiple infections on multiple machines and a raft of outdated products presenting serious security implications.)
They were in a cash flow crisis. If I hadn't had billing up by Monday morning, they would have been severely screwed. Yet, they were unwilling to assign any significant dollar amount to what I'd done.
The other side of businesses that pay too much for custom web development, is businesses that treat their IT systems like a consumer-level Windows XP box. And we know what happens to those.
P.S. IT, IS... whichever acronym floats your boat.
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 thousand times more load than stock wordpress before they fall down.
Come to think of it, I've never had a client that was the correct size for Wordpress. They were either way too small or way too large.
I want to punch all developers in the mouth who think a custom application for this type of situation is a good idea. They give us all a bad name and exacerbate the cost problem.
Web development has not reached the state where non-technical end users can maintain websites. In theory, sure, in practice, there's tons of money to be made fixing hacked sites and cleaning up years of technical debt.
I would not recommend Wordpress for anything other than a simple blog. Do anything else with it, you need a developer on staff. And a simple blog will never be enough for the needs of a small business.
I'd much rather work on some 90s-era custom-built app than the vast majority of brutally hacked together Wordpress sites.
If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really want a nice one. 10-100x, and there is no "free" entry point here.
Similarly with a house, it's pretty clear why house one costs more than house two. Using apartments in Manhattan as an example, you're looking 250K for a studio up to maybe 12.5M for a penthouse. 50x with a very clear reason.
(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 you if you want to write good, clean, testable code, but it still ends up the cheapest option you can give to a client if you want to be honest with him)
They usually associate complex work with physical products (laptops, phones, cars .. )
There's a huge cost difference between grabbing a pair of pants at Walmart and having a good tailor craft a pair of nice slacks.
And the difference between the two is glaringly obvious.
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 source solutions to the problem , found a few that fitted their requirements and showed them to the client.
Once they found one they liked, I FTPd the PHP upto their server, setup mysql and did the basic configuration for them. I then pointed them to the URL for the system, gave them some basic instruction and charged them $25 for the hour.
They were over the moon with that, since it was so quick and cheap.
Of course later they come back and say "hmm, this system is good but I wish there was an extra field here that did this and this part should work slightly differently".
So I said "hmm, ok. This is probably 5 hours work so except to pay around $125". At which point they said "What?! This is just a few small changes, how come the price is so much higher?! The system is open source, so you can just make these changes easily". This then puts you on the defensive as you have to justify that in fact to do these changes will involve reading a ton of someone elses code , finding the correct places to change things and testing that everything won't break.
Now , if they had paid $1000 for the original system (probably a fair price for the amount of actual functionality it enabled for them) then the $125 would look more reasonable.
The amount of value that they gained for the $25 was so high that you have their expectations have been set unreasonably high.
Plumbing or mechanicing have a higher barrier to entry since you usually need certifications and a significant outlay for tools/transport/premesis etc.
It depends on two things:
1. Where you get your business
2. Who your competition is
Dribbble leaves us with clients with the biggest budgets, who aren't afraid of 5-figure prices for web design. This is where we're competing with other high-end designers and thus our prices are more in-line with theirs.
Referrals are the strongest leads, with clients who when they don't have larger budgets are more comfortable stretching a bit because of our strong work for a friend or mutual acquaintance (and we're often happy to mark down a bit for a referral).
Leads from Google are where the clients who get really shocked come in; they don't really understand or appreciate the work that needs to go into good, iterative, considered UI/UX (and the custom development that goes along with it). The competition here includes a swath of companies who game SEO and outsource work offshore, and they can charge considerably less. Thus, our prices look unreasonably higher to the untrained eye.
There's also a phenomenon where cheaper clients expect more. If you move up in terms of positioning yourself as premium, better clients will consider you and your services-- the types of clients who aren't shocked by "high prices" for design and/or development.
So, if you find all of your clients are shocked at your prices, you're not marketing towards the right clients.
I would also highly recommend listening to patio11's podcast #3 about making more as a consultant: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/10/10/kalzumeus-podcast-3-grow..., and charging more http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...
I'am a self entrepreneur and I do some web designing from time to time. I recently got a lead for a organization which had EU funding of 250'000€. They wanted me to roll two sites with independent designs and features which's content had to be editable. I offered them my full consultation in choosing everything from ground up, but they kept on asking for the price. Once I told them I never heard anything back.
I offered to do the sites for about 0.5% stake of what they got from EU, but they apparently thought it was too much.
Recently a friend of mine was observing me coding and he was astonished of the complexity of it. As he said, 'For me, a button has always been just a button with no further functionality.' I also let him to change the source code as he was interested to see what effects it has on the program. He deleted a single bracket and was amazed to find that the program failed to run. I then continued to tell him that no matter how big your codebase is, a single mistake such as that might screw it all.
He now understands my frustration better.
I've done a ton of work for smaller outfits, and the fact is that whatever you're billing is coming directly out of their own wallet, or close to it. Imagine the shock when the mechanic says you need to spend $2,500 on a new transmission. That's what your clients feel.
That's also why I've turned away smaller projects for the past year. Everything becomes a never-ending, underpaying project from hell where you end up doing little tweaks for free because you're a nice guy/gal. You also end up competing with joker developers with lower rates who will probably do a hack job (the fight of "doing it cheap" vs "doing it right" is timeless on the small business front).
My point: If your clients are shocked and opting not to do work with you, find bigger clients. If bigger clients won't work with you, lower your rate and find smaller clients.
Even if they fight back at first, they typically give in, because quality is more important than expense (since everyone wants to cover their arse).
Sell your knowledge of digital marketing - SEO, Adwords, etc in order to drive sales for your client, which is ultimately the reason they want a website in the first place.
Disclaimer: I work for Vistaprint, who also owns Webs, and I always speak only for myself on news.yc, never for my employer.
I think you forgot step 1
I've found it's best to let the ones who balk at the true cost walk away. They will go find some cheap service to build what they want ("oh, can you make it like facebook?"). They will spend 3x as much as you quoted by the end of it, but they will learn to pay attention when a developer tells them how much it will cost.
The second project they ask you to work on to fix the disaster of the first will be a lot nicer.
Whatever you do, do NOT underbid, ever. I made that mistake a couple times and it turned into nearly a year of bitter burnout. Hard to like what you do when you are getting paid about 20% of what you should be due to invoice battles.
When someone walks into a $5 million dollar home they instantly know it's an expensive home not because they're aware of the materials and craft that went into building the house. It's because they have a point of reference, their home, for what something costs and they're able to extrapolate an approximate cost for something far more expensive.
People don't have this point of reference for web development because most people haven't ever hired someone to build a web app for them before, and most people have never tried to build a web app on their own.
A tip: Ask people for a few sites that they like and that they use. Take a look at them and approximate how much time it would take you and your team to get that application built from scratch.
Then say - okay to build an approximate version of X, you'd probably be looking at a team of 3-4 people (or 6-8, etc.) working full time for X months.
So that site likely would cost around X dollars for you to build.
The point isn't to get them to understand our craft and the effort involved.
This exercise helps give them a point of reference for how much the things they use every day cost, and from there they can start being realistic about what they can get within their budget.
And when I say they don't have a clue about what's involved you need to remember that many people can't plug in a printer. They have no idea about 300 dpi or 75 dpi or low quality jpegs or cross browser ("I click 'the internet' and there it is") or HTML or CSS or anything else.
But this is perhaps an opportunity! (A painful opportunity that's possibly full of woe, but still).
You create 5 mini sites of varying levels of complexity. You start with totally passive, html & css only, no updates, few images. You then build up, including tiny bits of dynamic content (roll-overs, javascript) all the way up to full content management. You describe how many hours of work are needed to create each of these, you show examples of wireframes. You also describe the design decisions the client would need to make ("Will your content change once a year? Your best choice is X But if you will add content once a week your best choice is Y").
You then give tentative costings. You make sure they're labeled as tentative and subject to change because of work involved.
You invite potential customers to talk to you about what they need.
Hopefully this will filter out people who have wildly wrong ideas about the costs or times, and will encourage people who want a website but who were too baffled to ask.
Of course, there are many risks of dealing with totally naive clients and it could be hellish.
WORK FOR PEOPLE WITH MONEY. LOTS OF IT.
It makes all the difference in the world.
Anytime you are building a web application, you are actually solving a business problem for your client. For example, that problem may be more driving sales or reducing staff time spend on a particular task.
You need to spend time diving into this with them to figure out what your project is really about. Then you can ask targeted questions to the client. For example:
"So, right now you're telling me that Jan and Ella are spending 20 hours a week processing the proposals. If we could reduce that to 5 hours per week, how much would that save you?"
"If we could improve the conversion rate on your flagship product by 10%, how much would that be worth annually in new revenue"
Once you've asked some questions like this, you can then position your price relative to these other values that the client has affirmed for you.
All of a sudden, it makes it much harder for them to feign shock at paying $25k for a system which increases revenue by $250k in the first year.
If you're not working with clients who have valuable problems to solve, find clients who do.
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.
* Go to Wordpress.com
* Choose a custom address ($18.00 / year for youraddress.com)
* Pick a pleasant theme
* Type in your content
Job done, right?
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.
My clients understand they're not buying a blog, or an e-commerce shopping cart, or a newsletter system, or {insert some feature here}. Rather, they're paying for my time and expertise -- and to provide that in context of what they want.
Any time I've encountered a customer who has sticker shock, I've always focused on making sure they knew what they were buying. More often than not, that always made customers much more comfortable. And, in a few cases, I explained that they should look for someone to provide their requested service at a lower cost. (Surprisingly, several customers freaked out and then pleaded with me to take their project. Go figure.)
Ex : "This client's site is all fucked up. A simple upgrade isn't possible because it was written 3 version back and the formats for everything changed. Rewrite it from scratch using this hideously complex tool which you've never touched before. It'll take you only 40 hours, right?".
As a business owner I know it will cost money but not in this rate. Now I am in Morocco with a great team, they are working 12 hours a day to finish this project for much much cheaper cost same quality. ++ Marrakesh weather is a bonus.
A large part of that is perception. Most buyers do not see websites as a high ticket items. Many see it as either just another business expense they have to make or they do not think it's worth investing into because it will not give them much of a return on their investment.
If your clients are shocked by the prices you give them, then there is miscommunication between your value & message and what they think their are getting. It's all about managing expectations.
When talking with the prospect about their future goals, and they mention they just need a website that (and I quote from a client here): "is very simple and just lists my name, my companies name and an address." That is NOT a client who will pay any sort of real money for a website. That type of client is best lead to the $10 website services. ... at least for me. I do not want to be dealing with such a low end client.
Though, one follow-up to such a client request that I've used to great success is:
Me: Just to make sure I'm understanding your correctly, you're looking for a ultra simple website that is essentially a business card but online right?
most of the time they will answer:
Them: Well, no not a business card. I'd want to be able to put some article on there, pictures, and there really should be a way for people to contact me through the site.
Me: Ah, so it's not something so 'simple' is it? Let's talk about what your business goals are. Where do you see your company being in 3 months? 6 months? 1 yr? Do you know to use the website at all for any sort of lead generation, information gathering and in-bound marketing?
At this point, they will usually start realizing that there is a lot of high value items to do done. Their needs and actual budget will now dictate which you and they will be able to take.
If you're unsure of what they can afford, you can always say something like:
"A project like this usually start around $15,000. Do you have a budjet allocated for a project like this? .... No? Ok, what do you believe it is worth and there are ways we can reduce this price by removing some items of value, so what value would you like to remove so that we can fit it into your budget?"
ie. Raise your rates! :)
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?
No but most of the time, clients compare it to the css theme a 15year old did for their wordpress install.