Back in my horse training days, it use to amuse me that you were lauded for the really easy winners, but not so much for the ones you worked your ass off on. Say you had a talented runner. You enter them in an easy spot. Then they win by 10 lengths. The horses owner would say what a great job you did. Truthfully, on those days anyone could have trained that horse and he would have won. Whether they trained him hard, went easy, or even walked him into the race. But then take another runner with physical problems. You nurse them along and miraculously, they make it to a race and win. This was a feat of horsemanship and sheer hard work. But they don’t win as impressively. But again the miracle was that you go them to the races at all. You never get as much credit for those as you did for really gifted horse.
So, what does this have to do with websites? Well, last Friday I had one of my most trying days in a long, long time. For my dedicated server, I use one of the biggest hosting companies in that space. They have a 99.9% up time rate which is great. They had a huge outage at their data center in Provo, Utah. It affected 5 of the biggest hosting companies in the world. So my site and many of my clients were down between 7-8 hours coming back up intermittently then going down again.
Talk about a day from he(double hockey sticks). I was really stuck all day. I could not work on sites on my server. And I could not get email. So my clients whose sites were down and didn’t have email, we’re trying to send me emails to tell me they had no service. I couldn’t receive their emails or respond. I did put a note on both my Twitter and Facebook pages, telling them to either call or text me. Fortunately, people did call and text me. So I could tell them what’s going on. But therein lies the rub. My hosting company really did not have an ETA as to when the problem would be resolved. They just said they’re working on the issue. Worse than that, sites didn’t come out and email for a bit here and there, but then go back down again. So after telling people their sites were back up, I had to tell them, now it’s down again.
While the problem was not my fault, or my doing. It is my responsibility as a web host. I informed clients the best I could, took all calls and texts, and communicated the best I could. Once things wee restored, I handled all maintenance requests, and everything was still completed within the same day.
Bottom Line: Although the day was a disaster, my clients received best in class support, and communication was excellent. I may not receive accolades for last Friday, but I certainly proved my worth on one of my worst days.
A friend of mine, a finish carpenter once told me people either buy a price or buy a job. If they are shopping for price, then they pick the lowest price available. They will not look to see which is a better end product. Big mistake, oh yeah.
I can tell you, that that is so true in my industry. The problem is you can’t compare apples to apples with websites. People come to you and ask for a price for a website with very little specifics. You can’t really give them a true price, maybe just some basic costs per page or by the hour until you have the specs.
I ran into this recently with a current client. He asked me what it would cost to build him a new website. Now the site he was describing was 20 to 30 webpages. I gave a price I thought was fair. But then he found someone online who said they could build him a website for a quarter of the price. I asked him whether or not they asked for specifics as to how many pages the site was going to be, whether it included a content management system, etc. No, as it turns out they asked for very few specifics and came up with a price. The problem is that when he goes to actually build the site, he’s going to find out they were (more than likely) talking about a introductory site with three or four pages. And yes, they can do the other pages but it’ll be an additional charge per page. And oh yeah, when they find out he wants a CMS, it will be considerably more as well.
Unfortunately, as is typically the case, when you shop for price, you get what you pay for. He will either have a substandard website, or he will pay through the nose to get what he wants.
So what do I advise? When you decide to build a website, write down a list of requirements for your site. Then go out and ask reputable web firms for an estimate. If the firms you get an estimate from all have the requirements you desire, they can give you an accurate price. Then you can make an educated decision as to what will be the best product at a reasonable price. You can have the product you want at the price that works for your company. The result will be a great website you can be proud of and that will serve your company well.
