True Story: A Guy Paid 46k For a 5 Page Website
Did you hear about this guy that spent 46k on a 5 page website? Probably not. It was supposed to be a 4 week, 7k project but it all went off the rails.
A few months ago this story was setting a lot of web designer watering holes ablaze. The guy wrote a post-mortem here.
Like me, you’ll probably fall of your seat when you see the website. 46k for THAT!?!?!
I’ve been designing websites at agencies and on my own since 1998. When I look at this site I’m astonished that it cost so much. I’m just AGOG. Seriously.
Don’t get me wrong, the website is fine.
But it’s a website that I or any halfway decent web designer could easily put together with their eyes closed over a week, comfortably for 10k.
There were lots of problems on this project. The agency he hired was to blame for many of them. But one thing that jumped out at me was this:
This guy was a software engineer.
When he started waxing poetic about the tech they used to build the website, I thought ‘Oh no’.
Why?
He shouldn’t concern himself with how the website gets made beyond being able to maintain it himself.
He was doing code reviews, which is nuts. Once a client gets themselves involved in the process of the ‘doing’, things tend to go badly for everyone.
As the Germans say Selberschuld (loose translation: ‘Self fault’)
He should have found a good Shopify freelancer and called it a day. He did not need a custom coded website. He actually acknowledges and agrees with this assessment later in his post.
Some other things he writes he would have done differently:
Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency (yep)
Structure for serial, incremental results (I refer to this as the launch and tweak approach)
Narrow the project scope (This is the reason I offer only what you really need to get started)
Agree on timelines (one week, one month, one quarter!)
This guy is making 45-72k in sales a month. This mistake won’t bankrupt him. But no one needs to go through this.
As much as I found myself in the ‘Why didn’t you just do [x]?’ choir, I realized a lot of these themes were familiar.
I saw this kind of thing happen ALL THE TIME at the macro level really when I worked at agencies. It’s part of the reason I avoided starting a web design business for so long.
Big companies were involved. Deadlines were blown, scope got out of control, clients payed waaay more than was originally agreed upon. Design and development teams were burned out and angry. No one was happy in the end.
In the really bad cases, lawsuits were filed. These were on big million+ EUR web projects, not 46k ones.
I even started to see this kind of wasted time and frustration happen at a micro scale in my own business.
It’s why I’ve created my Launch In A Day and Launch In A Week offers the way have; fixed scope in a fixed amount of time.
Structuring website projects this way isn’t just good for me, it’s good for my clients. Once a client hires a web designer they’ve basically tied their fate to that designer.
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If the project drags on and on, not only does the client lose time and money, there’s a huge opportunity cost. The fallacy of ‘sunk costs’ starts to work its awful magic and it seems too difficult to pull the plug and start with another agency or service provider all over again.
My offers are lean, streamlined, and designed to offer exactly the result you need in a condensed amount of time. As one client put it ‘We got just what we needed when we needed it’
Are you ready for a fantastic new website for waay under 46k in record time? Let’s talk