Yep, I’ve seen the signs posted all around town. “We build great websites”, “Custom Web Design – $300″, “Your business, Your Website – Call us today!!” There’s an influx of people trying to take advantage of the entrepreneurs in our city by building cheap websites and providing even cheaper design and brand development. We’ve all seen the templates you can buy online for $20 and you might be thinking, “Yeah! – that’ll do! That’s all I need and I don’t need to spend “X” dollars for some professional to build me a website….”
You can even get full flash templates online for less than $100 that are like the shiny, sparkling toy in the store window – that one you just HAVE to have… So, say you buy one…what now? Say you hire one of these guys who posts flyers on the signs at turn-signals and on your neighborhood’s telephone poles? What then? What is your brand? What colors or fonts or phrases, keywords and symbols describe YOU or YOUR BUSINESS? Whether or not you know the answers to those questions still begs the question: How do you know the guy with the flyer is going to deliver what he promises?
The answer to that question is “do your homework.” Would you take your car to be fixed by someone posting a bill in your neighborhood? You might – but you’d find out if they were a mechanic – whether by asking them directly, through neighbors or judge by the car(s) in his/her driveway (most ratchetheads have at least a 70′s era Corvette or 40′s era hot-rod in the driveway to tinker with). It’s the same thing with trusting your business’ website to someone. Find out if they’re someone who has at least a portfolio (eg. – that 70′s era Corvette in pristine condition) or if they’re that guy who just returned “learn HTML in 24 hours” to the library and is an expert at Googling “how to build a website”…
There’s an old fable about a man that had a very successful barber shop offering $10 haircuts. One day another shop opened across the street advertising “$5 haircuts”. The established barber, after watching the results of his competitor, over a few days, erected a sign stating “We fix $5 haircuts”. This is what I find myself doing on a consistent basis after my freelance clients have been sucked into one of these quick website-in-24-hours schemes and end up having a shit website they can’t do anything with.
I don’t pretend to be the best web developer out there. I don’t tell everyone I have the best portfolio either. My strength is customer service. I find out what exactly my client’s goals are in having a website and where they want it to be in the grand scheme of their business. A lot of what I do is education. Most of my clients don’t know what SEO is, why a good hosting company is important, whether a CMS is a good thing for their needs or not, should they be blogging?, Twitter?, Facebook?…. These are all things I can help with because I’ve made the mistakes, seen the successes, and have applied the lessons to help promote some really big brands. Almost all of the sites I’ve developed over the past 4 years came to me via client-testimonial or simply by word-of-mouth.
When a client asked me “Why should I pay you for a custom design and a full custom website when I can buy a template and drop my own words and logos into that.” Aside from pointing out the obvious (because 100000 other people are using the SAME template) – I take the time to educate them on how their business *could* benefit from a Search-engine-optimized architecture, keywords, color palette, icons, font-treatments, full motion (flash) and even social media integration. People like it when they learn something new – especially if it’s technology based – it makes them look good! (This is quoted from a client – I can’t make this stuff up…)
Every single URL I checked for “Web Design Company X” that I’ve seen posted around the city DID NOT have a portfolio linked on their site. NOT ONE. Don’t believe me? Next time you see that sign around town, take the 2 seconds it takes to memorize the URL and check it when you can. I’ll wager they don’t have links to any sites they’ve built, any case-studies they’ve completed or any reviews from current or past clients showing the results of their work. This is because the crap they deliver is BRUTAL. I know — I see it every time I pick up a new client.
The best Web Design Companies don’t post bills around town. They may even have a very simple site of their own at best. The reason why? They’re too busy making life BETTER for the small guy. They’re too busy helping entrepreneurs or enterprises build their business online, designing brands and making the web work for them!!
The next time you see that ad for “Custom Web Design” posted somewhere in your town – think about how you might find that Web Designer who is too busy ACTUALLY WORKING to advertise. When you find them – you’ll know you’ve made the right choice.
And badly coded. And badly coded things make me cry. Similarly, it bugs me when people expect my prices to be dirt cheap because I am a student. YES, they will be lower. Will you be paying me $10/h? Probably not. The reason being that I am obviously TRAINED in this field (even if my training hasn’t been completed), and I AM quite a good web developer, even for a student. I make $12 stocking shelves at the grocery store, I’m DEFINITELY going to charge more for something that requires brain power. 
