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Observing various thematic groups on social media, I very often come across posts and comments offering to build a website for a symbolic 100 Euro… Is there anything wrong with building a website for 100 Euro? Is there anything wrong with developing your skills by offering customers a low price? Is a website worth 100 Euro spoiling the market?
The topic has always caused, is causing and I suspect will cause great controversy, especially among people and companies offering higher rates. That’s why I decided to break down this topic into its prime factors. I hope this makes it easier for potential customers to understand why the low price.
The answer is certainly not clear and I am far from the opinion that this is spoiling the market… The free market sets its own prices, and if someone decides to create something for little money, they certainly have their own goal. However, it cannot be denied that we are often contacted by customers who were tempted by this low price and now have to “fix” everything yesterday.
Let’s look at it in a broader aspect than just the apparent savings here and now. Let’s analyze it from both sides.
Why is someone offering such a low price? After all, market rates are such that the project could be made more expensive without any harm to the client. What might motivate a person offering a service for the proverbial five hundred zlotys? There may be several answers.
The first issue is certainly the limited experience of such an “offer”. By lowering the price, it wants to increase the price attractiveness of its offer, and thus minimize the deficits resulting from limited experience. Simply this way, he wants to enter the market. Perhaps he is a student who does not need market rates because he still lives with his parents, and this form of work is for him an extra pocket money or a way to support his parents if he is not making money at home.
Especially in the latter case, I respect such a person, but is this really the best way to learn? Isn’t it better to look for a job or paid internship in an agency where this person will actually learn how to design and learn the secrets of this work? Gaining experience directly from customers can be risky, because in the event of a mistake, it is difficult to rebuild lost trust.
Another reason why someone might offer a low price is because they work with templates. Just install the CMS, upload the template, fill in the content and that’s it. There is not much work, so the price may be lower. Nevertheless, one may ask again whether such a service will really meet its goals. In general, maybe so, but also in details? I dare say I doubt it.
The third group may be frustrated people who, for various reasons, need financial resources and are able to drastically lower the price just to get an order. However, experience shows that such people like to disappear, even during design work, and then the whole process has to be started from the beginning.
There is a fourth group that comes to mind. While I can somehow understand and explain their honest intentions to the first three groups, for the fourth group I have no explanation, only criticism.
There are fraudsters in every professional group, including ours. Yes, I am not afraid to call this group fraudsters, because things should be called by their name, and while I can understand a student who wants to “make money”, I have no mercy for fraudsters.
There are people who offer a low price to attract a customer, and then it turns out that they either do not have the skills to provide the service, or simply, to put it in a psychological term, this low price was a “foot in the door”, and only then things start to go downhill, which means that in addition to the basic, low price, there are a whole lot of additional previously hidden costs that the customer has to bear, and since he has already started providing the service with this contractor, he regrets wasting his time and advance payments. Yes, advance payment. Serious agencies and freelancers tend not to use them, or only in very specific situations, but fraudsters do, and then they either disappear after taking an advance payment, or they consider the advance payment to be a scam for the client, which makes it even worse for him to cancel the order.
Since I have already described several examples of the types of people and companies that offer such a price, let’s now put ourselves in the role of the ordering party. In the previous paragraph I mentioned hidden costs and I think this term best illustrates the risks and consequences of working with a contractor “for five hundred zlotys”.
I’m not just talking about hidden financial costs. For an in-depth analysis, you need to look at it from a broader perspective. So what could these “hidden costs” of a cheap website be?
The first and probably key one is the business aspect. If we assume that we are working with a person with little or no experience or someone who works with templates, we can assume that the entire intellectual process of planning, defining target groups, analyzing their behavior, website goals and the actual needs of the customer will be omitted.
Of course, I do not deny young people the right to knowledge and analysis skills, but the lack of experience rather minimizes the likelihood that this difficult and key issue from the point of view of the website’s effectiveness will be thought through and the project itself will be the result of this analysis. This is not to say that the project will not meet the technical criteria or will be inconsistent with the latest design trends, perhaps everything will be OK in this respect, but will it meet the business goals? Only by chance if they are not analyzed and identified.
Wouldn’t a design based on a template also meet them? Probably not, because while the templates themselves could have been created thoughtfully, the considerations concerned general assumptions, for example the characteristics of the industry, but not necessarily the needs of this specific client.
Determining goals, target groups and other planning components is a key process in preparing marketing tools that are to fulfill their purpose, and it is not a simple process. It requires knowledge, experience and time. I write more about how to define goals and plan effective communication HERE.
To sum up. So what’s the point of saving money on creating a website if it doesn’t fulfill its role and doesn’t help you develop your business?
Another hidden cost, this time strictly financial, of cheap websites, the price of which results from the contractor’s inexperience or other “deficits” that do not allow them to offer a market price, are additional financial costs that arise, colloquially speaking, during the work. Leaving aside the scammers, I’ve already written one paragraph about them and that’s enough, it’s about the above-mentioned lack of experience. Despite the most sincere intentions and good intentions, there is a high probability that a situation may arise in which the lack of experience will not only result in the failure to carry out intellectual work on the project, but will also result in certain situations not being anticipated at the planning stage, and then will return with a vengeance in the future. during design work, which may significantly increase the implementation cost.
There are many answers here and it would be difficult to address them all in one article. So let’s focus on what is most important in the context of the topic at hand.
The first aspect is the savings, which in the long run turn out to be only apparent, because a cheap service either requires additional, previously unforeseen expenses, or simply does not pay off, so the cost incurred was like the proverbial couple gone wrong. Searching for the lowest price is common. I leave the answer to the question whether this should be the basic criterion for choosing a service that requires intellectual work to your own assessment. In my opinion no.
The client is not obliged to know the process of creating marketing tools. He also does not have to know how much its quality and well-thought-out structure and functions can affect the business. Not all companies have extensive marketing teams that will develop clear guidelines, especially since such companies are not looking for cheap contractors, but rather solid agencies that will “deliver the topic. In the case of companies with a less extensive structure and lower budgets, the role of the agency or an experienced freelancer should be to skillfully guide the client through the process of building marketing tools so that they are prepared effectively. The contractor should make the client aware of what the key elements are, what they entail, what intellectual process should be carried out before starting design work, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of the selected solutions. Will people offering an online service for a symbolic 100 euros be able or willing to do it? I have doubts about this.
Referring to sports… Fans watch a football match. They watch the players take to the pitch and then play the match. But is that all? NO. How individual players move on the pitch, what tasks they perform and how the team plays as a whole results from a thorough analysis of the players’ capabilities and the quality of the opponent, which the coach and his staff conducted long before the match. The game itself is the result of the chosen strategy, matched to the goal. The same should apply to the implementation of websites, mobile applications and all other marketing tools, the structure, UX, design and operation of which should be the result of a well-thought-out plan, not the uhlan’s fantasy and imagination.
In my opinion, one key thing emerges from the above analysis. Both the design and the resulting price of a website should be the result of an analysis, not a look at a price list or findings from outer space. To a frequently asked question – “how much does a website cost?” For years I have been answering – “how much does a car cost?” House? Plot?” – only when they hear such an answer, which is also a question, do customers realize that using the colloquialism “it depends” in this case is justified, because there are many aspects that influence it.
To sum up, if a contractor offers to create a website for a symbolic 100 euros, without even knowing the details of the project, it is worth thinking twice before making such a decision.
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