One of the things I love about my job is I get to work with all sorts of clients. And when I say all sorts – I mean all sorts.
The good – you know, the ones who have boundaries, pay on time, don’t scope creep.
The bad – the people who submit 6 pages of text all about themselves then wonder why they don’t get any leads through their website.
And the downright ludicrous – they tend to make up words for their business then pepper their copy with the words, name their packages after them then complain that the website isn’t indexing on Google for those search terms.
When it comes to SEO, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it understand how Google chooses websites.
I offer websites at two price points – this could be perceived as genius because it means in tough markets I still make sales. Or it could be considered idiotic because the budget sites are a fraction of the cost of custom builds, a fraction of the fun to build and, as you’ll know if you’ve been in this industry for more than 2 minutes, your lowest paying client will be the biggest demand on your time.
I get it – I really do. I often think back to the poor event planner of my (doomed) wedding where I was trying to rinse every single penny out of the budget, swapping out cups of coffee (only Mum would drink those) for extra prosecco (all of us would drink that) and the like. What I really should have done was just said ‘I really don’t want to get married but please can I have the party? Oh, and I don’t care what anyone eats, just keep the prosecco flowing’. One divorce later and I still think of that poor woman who had to deal with me maxing the budget.
Back to websites. My lower price websites are selling like hot cakes at the moment – great! But it takes 3 of those website builds to make up the same value of a custom build site. This means:
- 3 website builds
- 3 website user manuals
- 3 lots of onboarding
- 3 clients to work with
There are plusses and minuses to it – they tend to stay on for hosting and maintenance so they’re people I go on to have solid relationships with. The minus is that these websites are still at the top of someone’s budget and they’re trying to rinse everything they can from it. Which is…. Irritating. I can spend hours on Zoom calls helping them to choose the website that’s right for them, explaining that the bigger sites are better value and they’re like ‘no, I *only need* this many pages….’ Usually they’re trying to save quite a small amount of money.
Once they’ve submitted their website copy, usually it means the website will be a lot more pages and I have to go back to them. At which point they say a breezy ‘oh, just put it in the other site and I’ll pay more’. Not a possibility when we’re already at first draft.
I’ve been in the web design game long enough to handle it and I tend to only take these clients on when it’s in a lower economy and it’s harder to pass them off to other designers and still put food on the table. But they really do make me grateful for my custom build website clients, who are usually a lot less complicated. They’re usually at a point in their journey where they’ve made some money, are confident in their services and are hiring professionals (hello lovely copywriters, branding specialists and photographers) alongside me, to put the puzzle together.
That’s all for today. I’ve just agreed to work on someone’s website and it has no less than 40 plugins on it. I immediately deactivated 17 of them and discovered that 9 all do the same thing. Web design – the industry which just keeps on giving and where skillsets are definitely not equal.
