BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

While doing various demos with clients I can’t help but notice one scary trend. Client usually checks the demo page from his or hers computer, prepares a list of issues and then we meet to go over them. A lot of clients complain right off the start that their web site doesn’t look exactly like it should or behaves strangely. The reason, of course is not the fact that the web sites we designed aren’t compatible with their browsers, but their browsers being dramatically out of date.

There were so many times when this had happened, it actually became one of the internal internet memes. The phrase “but this is a brand new computer, we only bought it year and a half ago” isn’t that funny anymore. People are becoming increasingly overprotective of their computers, calling them their “friends” and “babies” – “my baby is sick, can you fix it”, “my dear friend have been acting strange lately, maybe he’d caught a virus or something”.

Worse yet, when you point to those issues you face further complaints that you are trying to avoid your responsibilities and you should make web site work with any browser on Earth. While in general it is true, the task is all but impossible – try stuffing that intro flash movie down the throat of Lynx and you will get the idea . Or, more realistic scenario – the famous Internet Explorer 6.0, that some people still think is good enough browser. In fact, according to statistics on my most traffic-heavy clients’ web sites the IE 6 is 4th most popular browser, after IE 7, IE 8 and Firefox (all versions).

Unfortunately, quite a few things are simply impossible to achieve in this world. One of them is the browser compatibility. However, there’s a pretty good chance that if you make something look critical and urgent and very important overall – people would listen, look and take action.

So from now on if you venture to this web site using one of the older browsers (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox are supported at the moment) you will see a bright yellow bar on the top of the page saying that your browser is old and needs to be updated with a link to a page where you can choose what to do as well as a link to page where I explain why it is important to keep the browser up to date. If you are using the latest and greatest but just anxious to to see what the page looks like – feel free to look here: http://www.istudioweb.com/browser-information/.

Recently, on some community web site I noticed couple of discussions that were directly related to the topics of this blog. First was telling a story about some good looking girl sitting in the mall in the booth that stated “Your Home Page in 15 Minutes” (hence the name of the post). Another discussion’s focus was on coming changes to web site builders’ pricing in view of global economy crisis. As you can see, the two are very interrelated (and many participants had it noted).

So what’s the story with Home Page in 15 Minutes? Will this fast-food web design prosper in times when every single company is looking to cut costs and therefore subject itself to services of much lower niche of web design studios? How would the whole market look like in a year or two?

Well, yes – and now. Obviously, if you can pay less for some service you don’t particularly understand – most likely you will. After all, the old adage of sergeant reminding his soldiers that their weapons were made by the lowest bidder hasn’t gone anywhere yet and is still around. Even more so, it’s much easier to convince a small business owner to shed off $99.95 (or whatever small amount you can think of) for basic web site then to make him pay anywhere near what the job might cost if done on a scale large enough. In fact, Zealus has web sites that ultimately cost from less then $2,000 to over $50,000 – both extremes being small business operations.

The “no” part is a little trickier to understand. Once you reach certain level of revenue as well as certain level of community recognition – you just can’t afford to have that free purple on pink template on your web site anymore. More so, your demands for web site grow with your business. You want different flash presentations for different products. You want to add some interactivity. You want to be able to adjust prices when you want to, not when your web design company has time for it. So you go for CMS-driven web site, or some e-commerce solution. Costs rise, and one day you realize your web site isn’t done as “McDonalds”, but more like a restaurant in downtown. You might even end up with several web sites for each branch of your products, so think “Olive Garden” or “Uno”.

I am not making a prediction here, but I want to digress a little. Once I’ve learned how easy it is to set up and populate a store on Yahoo or eBay or any other “free” platform, I stopped making my purchases there. The rationale is simple – this could be a fly-by-night shop I don’t know anything about. It’s not like I haven’t seen my share of nicely designed credit card traps on their own domains, it’s just that the risk is so much higher that I prefer to pay a few dollars more at Amazon.com then to risk the entire amount beign charged off.

It should be a common knowledge already that the less the client pays for your service, the more of your time he/she consumes. Usually this happens because they try to save every penny and argue about minor things that naturally should have been let go. However, by concentrating on such minor issues, the client totally misses the major stuff that needs his/her attention.

For example, let’s take an online store. By being a royal pain in any place you can imagine the client takes about a week to decide between the two offered ways of presenting a single product on per line in the store (a decision of two hours at most, really!). Then we, thinking of a better way to promote the product the client sells, offer an addition to the store that (by our calculations) should increase product exposure by large volume. It’s a trendy perk, not many stores have it, so it would naturally rise confidence in web site. Client impolitely declines, since it will be more expensive and push us to complete the project. Which we, of course, did.

On the closure meeting that lasts two hours instead of 40 minutes client politely listens to the presentation on how to use their store (almost without taking any notes), after which goes on about how he wants us to change the design since “we never discussed that there would be only one item per line”. That is – after they have agreed on the draft, confirmed (no less then two times) that no additional changes are necessary and that web site will look exactly like on the picture. And after the week-long heated discussion on how to present single item per line in a best way. They delay the last installment. We offer that they keep the last installment and go with another web design studio, since they are dissatisfied with the job we did (although we did everything according to the specs, offered additional functionality and features, accommodated their shoe-string budget and so on).

Now, I am not writing this to bash clients – they are in their right to make mistakes. They probably just need to learn how to take responsibility for them, but that’s not my concern. The more clients come in our way the more I see a trend where people who pay more money for essentially same product (i.e. web site – in any of its form) take less of your time by managing important parts of their web sites and leaving technicalities to us. After all – that’s exactly what they are paying us for. People who can afford to spend more money value their time and our time more then those, who spend less. In different terms – they know how to delegate responsibilities because this makes them more money. This knowledge, as far as I understand, comes after certain level of acquired business experience. What’s cause and what’s effect – knowledge or money – I think is obvious.

So the next time I see this client (hopefully it won’t be as painful as it was last time) I will give them couple of links to a good articles on delegating responsibilities. No matter how much hard time our clients give me, I still believe in educating our customers. Can’t vouch for this particular case, but the general trend says that it helps.