About two weeks ago I received an email from a lady who took one of my classes about two years ago. She was looking for a website redesign for her employer.
Well, I put together a nice proposal and emailed it off to her. For two weeks I didn’t hear anything. Then yesterday comes this email:
Will,
We have decided to go with a bid from another web company because of the time frame they can provide. Over the last two weeks, we’ve realized we need our website “yesterday”. Your pricing and other items were right in line with the other bid, but we decided to go with them because of our timeline.
Umm, ok. My response (once I calmed down from the sheer stupidity of the scenario):
Hi X,
Congratulations on your selection of a designer for your website! I personally would never build and launch a website in two weeks. I don’t think it would be fair to my clients. Nonetheless, I wish you luck (blah blah blah)
I ran the response past my PR team (aka my wife) and verified that it wasn’t a smartass reply. I didn’t want to come across that way, but rather let them know that I create quality, and I can’t create quality in a matter of two weeks.
Sure, I could throw together a website in a few days. Any web designer could. But it wouldn’t be optimized for search engines. In fact, I’d be willing to bet the ‘winning bidder’ won’t even put meta descriptions and keyword-targeted titles on each page. Heck, that’s the easy part, but I bet they don’t.
If you’re serious about building a website, you need to take the time to get more than pretty colors on a page. You need to sit down and think about how you’ll market your site. Will the site simply be a brochure, or will it be a full-out marketing machine, ready to suck in customers and spit out revenue?
If you’re not serious about a website, just pick any two and I’ll get started on it.
- Good
- Fast
- Cheap
