furosci

The other day I took a friend of mine to this taco stand I like a lot. We walked up to this window at a gas station and placed our orders. It ended up costing somewhere around $1.50 a taco. While we waited I reassured my friend that the food at this taco stand is fantastic. Why do I feel the need to this? Because, as consumers we immediately associate cheap with low quality, right?

Logic dictates that higher price = higher quality and higher quality is a better investment. Can this also be said of web design? Maybe not.

I know, blasphemy! How dare I as a web designer insinuate that you can have quality work for a low price? Well, here’s the thing: web design isn’t what it used to be. We interface with the Internet more, and in so many different ways that new technologies have arisen to meet this need, and many of those technologies are free.

We are at a really beautiful time in the history of the Internet. Right now the web design and development community is so jazzed to just be around that we are cranking out new Content Management Systems faster than you can shake a stick at. Programming languages are developing into very efficient beasts and making it very easy to produce awesome sites in no time at all.

Where as it used to be, creating a beautiful, well coded site used to require an intense attention to detail, programs like Dreamweaver made it all too simple. People could just throw some tables up and images and text generally where they wanted. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, just look at my old site, matthewcarver.com, looks nice but is it w3c Compliant? Hell no! (I know, I need to fix it. I’m busy, leave me alone.)

Now, people are abandoning WYSIWYG design for PHP based CMS’, which is great, but now I’m seeing something new entirely. Hacked together Wordpress themes. Half assed Drupal blogs replacing what should be a full autonomous website. Do they function? Yea. Are they cheap to produce? You Bet. The problem is, a good Drupal or Wordpress needs to be very thoroughly executed and a lot of the people selling these types of sites are not taking the time to do them properly or telling their clients what they are selling. Most of the time, if you aren’t updating content regularly, you don’t need to get mottled up in the mire of a CMS. It’ll be a huge headache to transfer the content and good luck when you try to higher a designer to update your site. I just had to spend an hour working with a client who had a Wordpress site trying to figure out where the content I needed to update was, only to find out that whoever made the site was managing half of the content in the theme itself written in non-compliant HTML.

So a CMS isn’t a one size fits all answer and WYSIWYG designers and developers tend to throw out bad code, but those are the cheaper options, what am I getting at?

Here’s my point: WYSIWYG and CMS’ are cheaper and easier on the designers, not in methods of producing themselves, but in their philosophy. Dreamweaver makes reading and compiling HTML and CSS very easy, as do the free (or cheaper) light weight options (I’m really into Text Wrangler right now, by the way) and CMS’ gather and implement content efficiently, but there are better ways to do this that enable the designer to produce quality code quickly that fits the clients needs perfectly. Try thinking outside of the box and you can see not that these systems work (because they do), but why these systems work.

I’m developing a system right now that uses a series of .txt files and PHP to deliver easily updated content. Is it pretty on the back end? That’s debatable, but does it work… you bet! Dreamweaver puts everything in place for you, that is the beauty of WYSIWYG, but you what does that even better? A good use of div tags and some CSS. If you have trouble with spacing in CSS (which is understandable) try using a grid system like 960 (I am the biggest advocate for these guys right now, it’s just a sexy grid and really easy to use).

From the front end Photoshop and Illustrator work, to the back end coding, there are far too many people out there who are on the developer and designers side. That’s the beauty of the web, it online we are all on the same team. Now all of this isn’t to say ALL web design should be quick and cheap. You get what you pay for as well, but if you want quality work at a cheap rate, here are some things to keep in mind:

1.) Give the Designer Some Space.

Sometimes, if you let the designer do his thing if can cut costs way down. I know this is true of my work. If you want something very specific, that’s going to take a lot of revisions, tweeking, and general nit pickery. If a client calls me and says something like “You don’t know how I do my job, and I don’t know how you do yours, so make me something nice and we’ll go from there” generally I’ll cut a lower rate because first of all, I’m getting to do something I’m passionate about which is create a site creatively. Secondly, the client is a lot less likely to be in need of multiple concepts and revisions which means the site will take dramatically less time.

2.) Be Prepared!

I am not a copy writer. Can I write? Kind of.  I had to run this blog by my girlfriend to clean it up for typos (she hasn’t done it yet, so the typos are all my fault) . Do I want to write? Sure, but only blogs and screenplays. I don’t know your business as well as you do, and even if I did, I’m not a trained copywriter. If you have images you want on the site, let me know. In fact if you want to browse a stock site and grab the images yourself, its going to make life a lot easier on me and it’ll shave hours off your invoice.

3.) Time is on Your Side.

Give me time, and I’ll give you a lower rate. Call me 10pm and want a site turned around by morning, I’m going to get really pissed. No offence, but just because I freelance does not mean I am on the clock 24/7. I get emergencies. Your server crashes at 2 a.m., I am here for you, but if you want your site to go from concept to live overnight and you tell me as I’m eating dinner, it’s not going to be cheap. The longer the deadline, the lower the over all rate. Now, I’m not saying you should drag your feet, but giving a little wiggle room on the clock just makes the project go a little smoother.

In short, web design can be both cheap and of high quality, as long as the client isn’t making a hasty decision and the developer makes some wise choices. We all want to make money, that’s just human, but I don’t think there is a person out there who will say “I want to provide inferior websites at an inflated price”.

If you read this blog and you’re looking for a web site that’s affordable, but not cheap, give me a shout. If you’re here as a designer/developer looking for tips on how to keep your prices low and quality high, also give me a shout, like I said earlier, I believe in the internet as a community, that’s what makes it so beautiful.