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
Will,
I feel your pain. Worse yet I feel the pain of the person /company that doesn’t end up with what they are ultimately striving to achieve by means of their website. Imagine the frustration when the web site does not accomplish or even come close too what was proposed and promised to them.
It is inevitable they will spend a lot of money and turn around and claim that SEO is a bunch of magic potion or beans. My guess depending on how serious they are about bringing quality traffic to their website she/they may never get it, or understand it. It is a likely scenario they will be dissatisfied with your industry as a whole, unfortunately lumping you and your competition as one in the same.
I do not recall talking with you about this unless it slipped my mind. I ultimately would like to take such mistakes by customers and post them on my blog as educational matters. One you have posted the other is coming soon.
Maybe titling them in a category named:
Learn from them or don’t?
What did they do wrong?
What could I have done differently?
You get my point I’m sure, the idea is to get people to think harder b4 making the same dumb mistakes.
PS Welcome to the real world “RETAIL END” of SEO.
Ironically I believe one of the things in your class you mentioned is that SEO doesn’t happen overnight.
Oh thank you. I get this so often and it’s nice to know I’m not alone.
Another scenario I see are the “on the rebound” clients who just broke up with their web designer and need someone to save them right away because something is broken. It’s a no-win scenario for true professionals who realize that good relationships are nurtured over the long run.
Sphunn!
I wish that web design was the only place we saw this.. So many people simply can’t grasp the concept of things taking time any more.. I see it almost daily in our jewelry business with people wanting hand made jewelry in a week.. Yeah, right.. We thank them for thinking of us and let them know that our schedule and craftsmen simply can not produce quality work in such a short amount of time..
The trick is to continue to emphasize quality over speed and ask the customer if they want the best or the fastest..
I totally know the feeling. I always push a 60 day time line for non dynamic projects, and 90 days for custom dynamic (and right now I’m flat out rejecting over one over my work load). Anything sooner than that would be rushed and of much lower quality, and naturally you have to have the old if the client isn’t happy with the design clause this will cause the contract to be extended.
Working as a professional SEO I’ve seen this sort of scenario as well and nearly 90% of the time these companies miss their timelines, end up over charging, end up disappearing, and in one case told the client he could no longer warranty / support their website! As with everything else in life you pay for what you get.