Sarah Parmenter, a web and UI designer.

Yesterday I went to meet a new potential client who sells a very high end product (upwards of £70k per item) who also wants to produce a website for each product that is sold, to essentially give the purchaser a turn-key solution from the word go.

My job would obviously be designing the sites that get sold onto the clients.  When the initial enquiry came in we had a chat over the telephone and I asked how much he was currently paying per site, he said “£400″, to which I said that I would be considerably more and would he still like the meeting, he said ‘yes’ so I went and had a face to face chat with him.

Without going into too much detail, as I truly do not believe this is the clients fault, I’m just seeing an increase in this across the board, the client in question was thankfully a web savvy client who knew the difference between a table based and div based website, albeit all of his websites contained tables used in the wrong context but that’s by the by for the moment, he was very easy to chat with regarding the best solution for his site(s). I certainly came up with an excellent solution to his problem that would provide him with an superb selling point to his customers and also considerate of him making a nice profit on each site too, solutions which no other web designer had suggested to him.

Back to the office, write the proposal, send it. Wait.

Wait some more. Phone rings. It was the client calling to let me know I was too expensive and that if I could negotiate down on price..

Somewhere in the region of £400, like we’re currently paying…

He would be able to use me. I should point out here, I have the utmost respect for clients who have the common courtesy to call/email to say “Thank you but we won’t be using you for x,y,z reasons” – as normally, as we all know, a proposal gets sent with out so much as a “Thank you” to be had, let alone a response if you haven’t quoted what they thought you should.

The price point however, is of course an issue. After posting to Twitter I realised there’s a small minority of people “making websites” who just don’t understand pricing on the web, this small group don’t realise how much harm they are causing our industry.

I had quite a few messages sent to me on Twitter, including:

forward this to @**** he would knock out a website for that price.. plus hes good.

and

pass that site to me … i will look on it ..

And I sent back the same response to both, saying they are not understanding my point. If I wanted to I could “knock out” a website for £400, I could “knock out” a website for £10, unless I’m needing to licence something, my only outgoing cost is my time, therefore anyone could do a website for any cost, but there’s a reason we don’t and this is the big black hole many people are just not grasping. What we do isn’t easy folks, we take it for granted because we know it inside out and this is our professions but for many people, turning on a computer is about as far as they go, let alone all the many things we have to do to produce a site – just like any other service industry (solicitors, physiotherapists etc. etc) , we have specialist knowledge of our sector but a small minority are completely undervaluing that knowledge.

It’s all about integrity, integrity for what you do, integrity to the web community. By “knocking out” websites the care and attention to detail ultimately must suffer and in turn, give web designers a bad name as inevitably, the client is going to come into problems later down the line and turn to someone for help, and then expect that person to be super cheap too.

It’s about value for the client, how much is that website worth to them? Not a lot if someone down the road will produce it for £400.

Apple are a great example of brand and price point awareness, the products are high end, they do their jobs spectacularly and the price points are the same across the board, you won’t find Apple stores with differentiating prices and they never have a sale. They have a product they know consumers want so they have no need to drop the pricing substantially – people will still buy.

As web designers, we are holding the largest marketing portal in the palm of our hands and yet people still don’t understand it’s value.

It’s up to the designer/coder if they want to accept £400 for that job.Some people don’t have the luxury of turning down work – a response to my tweet

and

i got your point …i am saying that send that project to me … send that client mail to me …

No one has the luxury of turning down work – even web designers who are busy and booked up obviously still need a stream of enquiries to enable us to carry on into the future.

Put it this way, if the Yellow Pages, (the traditional printed book) 10 years ago said to everyone “You can have a full page colour advert for £10 per year” can you imagine how big the book would be? They didn’t, because this would devalue their product. This is a very basic way of me trying to get across what some web designers are doing to our industry, only it’s worse because it’s starting to filter through to clients who we then have to work with.

Let me go back to a quote from above regarding Apple:

They have a product they know consumers want so they have no need to drop the pricing substantially – people will still buy.

We have a product consumers want, we have the ability to pretty much set the pricing based on the value to the client however, it needs to be done by every single web designer. If the price point was, for arguments sake £1000 + to build a basic site, clients would get to know this and everyone would gradually see budgets increase to make allowances for this, yes including you Mister “I will produce a site for £400″.

There’s so much more to this argument than I can even get into now however, let me just check, you want me to plan, project manage, design, develop, jQuery, cross browser test, validate, seo and respond to the countless emails you are bound to send me, all minutes within you sending them, for £400?

Sorry, but I’d pay £400 to keep my integrity.

I thought it would be helpful to share some of my experiences of Snow Leopard with the web community, as we would have similar software and needs.

We first installed Snow Leopard on my other half’s Black Macbook (2GB), it took about an hour in total and upon returning to the laptop, it had restarted itself and was sitting on the home screen with the new Snow Leopard wallpaper. Great until we tried clicking on something, anything. The whole lot jammed up, we had the spinning beach ball of death and no matter what we did, we couldn’t get into any applications, no menus, nothing. Reading the few resources available to people who have run into trouble with Snow Leopard, it seemed everyone else could at least get into Disk Utility, Verify the disk and then everything was working hunky-dory. Not with us – sods law.

So, after forcing a restart I held down “C” while the Macbook was restarting forcing it to boot from the disc instead, we went through another hour of Snow Leopard installation and kept an eye on it throughout, not that a slightly moving blue bar was anything to keep an eye on but it made us feel a whole lot better!

Installation complete, restart – same problem. Spinning wheel of death.

Simply because I’d run out of ideas and the lack of anyone else having the same problem on the Apple Forums, we left the beach ball spinning, for about 25 minutes, when eventually it popped up saying there was a font conflict problem, would we like to delete or replace (some conflict involving Helvetica Neue) and once these had been deleted, the whole system was great, working snappier and with 10GB of free hard drive space.

Installation on my iMac – (3GB, 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo) went smoothly without any hiccups at all. I’ve tested a lot of my apps, Photoshop CS3 and CS4 are working without any problems at all, all my additional Plugins seem to be working as they should in Photoshop CS3. I haven’t used it enough in my day to day running of You Know Who yet to know 100% if there are no problems, but on the surface, it seems fine. The only apps I’ve had to resolve straight away are 1Password, which automatically prompted me to switch to their 3.0 beta and Dropbox needed an upgrade too – (http://bit.ly/12IQgy).

We purchased the family pack, so for £19.50 per computer, I’m really pleased with the results and it has made a noticeable difference to the speed of both the iMac and the Macbook.

This is going to come across as a bit of a rant, but it’s a rant with purpose, it’s a rant that I feel every single person in the web design field can contribute to abolish.

Let’s get one thing straight, we might be creative, artistic, any other word that fits your persona but we are in a service industry. However we dress it up, we are a service industry. I feel like we, as designers must be doing a bad job of branding ourselves as our clients don’t seem to agree.

I’ll put my rant into context, our freezer broke down a couple of months back, we called a specialist who came round to our house, pulled out our freezer and took a look at the back and promptly told us it was unrepairable, charged us £45 call out fee and promptly went on his way 5 minutes later. This is how I expected this to work, I was calling this guy out from doing other paid jobs, to come and look at my freezer and use his skills, that I don’t have, to tell me whether I need to buy a new one or not.

I have had two incidents crop up in the past month, both have been from clients who think they can just not pay their invoice. Can I have a refund on the time I spent on your project please, then you can have a refund.

The first has just decided it’s “ok” to ask for a deposit refund because “they” don’t want the website anymore. The second, a logo design where the client said they had a “great idea” of what they wanted, that turned out when they saw it in the flesh, they didn’t like. I had banked on completing it in the allotted time but then couldn’t allocate anymore time to them due to the other clients that week,  so they went elsewhere, but decided that because I didn’t complete the final design, it means I shouldn’t be paid for the time I did spend on their project.

Why is this? How has this crept into our industry and why, when it’s accepted in other service industries, is it so hard for our clients to accept our time is just as valuable? In-fact, we aren’t as bad as solicitors, who I’ve been in regular contact with about one of the above projects this week (I will post about this at a later date), who charge not only by the hour for their time, but also per email/letter read and for time spent on the telephone.

How can we hammer this point home? It’s our time, and time spent working on projects that they ask us to do, is time that we can’t spend on another project and our invoices should always reflect this. It’s that simple, but what are we doing wrong as an industry that means our clients are thinking differently?

Let’s, please, change this.

This never ceases to amaze me. I had a project enquiry come in yesterday, the client initially asked for a ‘Web 2.0 website built in flash”… to which I had to explain that those two words don’t really belong in the same sentence. Maybe this was a warning sign however, I forwarded my website worksheet to try and gauge a little better just what exactly they were after …. sent in two seconds and no harm done.

I get the worksheet back and they do have a great idea of what they are looking for, a site identical in functionality to a well known CBBC website. They have thought about colours, brand awareness, the actual users of the website, everything. It was one of the most detailed design briefs I had seen in a long time. I skip to the part where I always ask about budget, curious as to how much they have put aside considering all other aspects of the site have been well thought through, only to see…

Ballpark around £500

My reaction is always split down the middle when I see ridiculous web budgets. I normally start off annoyed and then come round to the fact that it’s just down to the client being misguided by someone or something or having no knowledge of the web industry whatsoever. This is normally when I respond with a very diplomatic email and this one was no different, here’s an outline of what I said.

Thank you for the prompt reply with the Website Worksheet. I have had a good read through and I totally understand what you are looking to achieve.

However, the budget you have set for the site is unfortunately not enough to build a site of this calibre. I do understand it’s hard when you are not in the field to know how to gauge a budget correctly, it’s my job to try and give a little insight into budgets and why, in this particular case, you will struggle.

The xxxxxxx website you are comparing your new site to, is large. I know you will be starting off small and building up to a large website, but the infrastructure still needs to be in place to enable you to add news items and video every day and gradually build up the content.

I then went on to explain the process of web design in brief, how we start off on paper or wire framing, then turn our hand to design then eventually the development side. How we have to inevitably go back and forth on the design until sign off and then deal with stumbling blocks with cross browser compatibility and so on.

I estimated the site would take 4 weeks solid work with 2 people working on the site. I then explained the following:

£500 over 4 weeks divided by 2 people works out at £1.56 per hour – I’m not showing you those sums to be patronising at all, please don’t think that, but I’m just merely trying to point out why it would have to be increased considerably before we could look to producing the site for you.

I don’t need to go any further into details, the client can work out for themselves that £1.56 an hour is below minimum wage and that our profession is highly skilled, therefore it would take a lot more than £1.56 to even get us to our desks.

I then signed off the email with the following:

I know you said £500 as a ballpark, I’m just trying to give you an idea of what a professional web design firm would charge you to get the standard that I know you want to achieve.

Inevitably, I never hear from the clients again, or if I do, it’s for them to say they “don’t have the budget” to use me. I still feel like it’s my job to try and explain why I wouldn’t be able to help them rather than just sounding cocky or not responding at all. I feel like the only way we can stop this from happening is to break down exactly why their budget is insufficient rather than leaving them in the dark about it – for the sake of the client and the next designer they approach.

NB. I have just received a very appreciative email from the client in question thanking me for my helpful breakdown and that explaining to them in basic terms was exactly what they needed. They have been able to increase the budget to a reasonable amount, possibly still not enough however it’s a good step in the right direction.

This weekend saw one of the worst client interactions I have had. The intention of this post is not to expose who the client is or to show them up, but to highlight an industry problem that I want to campaign to change across the board. I will therefore not be saying who the agency or the client is, as this is irrelevant to the topic.

A brief history, I was hired to create a website back in October, the project bounced back and forth between me, the agency (they’re not a digital agency in the sense we all refer to it, but for arguments sake we’ll call them an agency) and the client, largely due to the fact the client withheld information for weeks on end or simply didn’t provide it at all, even re-designed their own website in publisher at one stage only to revert to a hybrid of our design and theirs at a later date. Say no more.

So fast forward to launch day, a Friday at the end of March (I had completed a further 4 e-commerce sites in the time it took to complete this one!) , the site is completed, against all odds, they had had the final invoice and they were aware of my terms and conditions;

“The remainder of the balance is paid upon completion of the project prior to any files being transferred”

My clients pay 25% of the total project at the start and the remainder 75% is paid upon completion prior to launch. I have done this for the past 3 years due to an incident a couple of years before when a client locked me out of the server, changed the passwords and ran off with a brand new website. I have never had a client complain or question this clause before – possibly because it’s common sense, you wouldn’t walk out of a car showroom with a brand new car without paying for it, why is this any different? Milestone payments are not a new thing, in fact I will probably change them to smaller percentages more often to defer that risk even more but, enforcing them before site launch is less common and something I want to campaign to be the “norm” in web design.

Again, without going into too much detail, on launch day I had the agency demanding the site to be put live. I referred back to the T&C’s and explained that I had made people aware of this prior to launch day and that under no circumstances would I put the site live prior to the balance of the site getting paid, that it was nothing personal and something I do with all my clients. To this I received a very icy response from the agency and I asked that they send me an email with how they want to proceed. I go out for the evening, come back and grow suspicious that I had heard no more communication, I check the site in question only to find it live. Not only live but they had already changed the FTP passwords for the site. so that I was locked out.

N.B. We had been dev’ing on the agency server towards the end to test all the SSL encryption and the payment gateways properly, this is where some people would argue the files had already been transferred and as such, payment should have been due the minute we placed the files on the clients server, the way I was thinking – there was still a holding page up so, until the final tweaks were done and the index file uploaded, it wasn’t live or completed. In actual fact looking back now and considering what happened, I think you would be right that the minute the files were on the clients server would have been the right time to at least collect a milestone payment. Live and learn…

The agency putting the site live really got to me, a lot, however I was not about to let it slide and nor was I about to do anything in anger. I calmly thought about what my choices were and decided the only thing I could do would be to remove the MySQL database that was feeding the site. So that’s what I did, in turn I found out what the new password to the FTP was and placed the holding page back up so that it didn’t look unprofessional to any visitors and shut down for the evening..well by this time it was 3am.

The following morning, Saturday, I awake to a couple of strongly worded emails from the agency.  I re-explained that these were my terms and conditions, that my contract was with the agency and that I expected my terms and conditions to be adhered to. They were aware of the circumstances but thought for whatever reason intentionally or unintentionally,  they didn’t apply to them. Here is the explanation I sent to the agency to explain exactly why I use this clause in my contract:

This is how I see it, and why my T&C’s are laid out this way:
“The remainder of the balance is paid upon completion of the project prior to any files being transferred.”

The reason for this is so that;

a) the developers/designers are paid for the work done on the project prior to any files being transferred because it’s too easy for clients to do what (agency) did last night and lock people out of the server once they’ve got the files then disappear, OR define their own payment terms, as they have no incentive to pay on time once they are in possession of a live site.

b) You tend to have a transition period where if the client has 2 weeks to pay or a month they think any further significant changes are included in the website price, I’ve seen it happen years back and you loose hundreds of pounds just trying to keep them happy to ensure you get your money.

This is the reason the industry turned to milestone payments, ie. where the bulk of the money or all of the money is transferred before the site goes live. This protects the designer/developer and it’s also fair, you get paid, the client gets their site.

I just don’t see what the problem is with paying for the project, and the fact there has been so much uproar about it makes me suspicious. That’s been in my terms and conditions for 3 years and this is the first time I’ve ever had a problem with it?

I can’t help but feel the time spent going behind my back and putting the site live would have been better spent doing a BACS or Paypal Transfer of the balance so it could be put live through the correct channels?

Once I am paid what I am owed, the site will be restored.

Further emails followed, and I’m sure you can guess the tone. I have never felt bad for asking clients for payment prior to the site going live, the way I see it is business has to be a two way transaction, the client is getting a brand new site, you are getting paid for the work you have done. It really does seem simple.

My reason for highlighting what happened to me is that the agency’s defense was that other web designers they had worked with did not have these types of terms and conditions, to me, other peoples terms and conditions are irrelevant and this is the way I’ve done business for 3 years without any problem whatsoever.

I would like us, as a web design community, to make something that is common sense – concrete in our workflow. I do not think any website should be put live without prior payment of some kind, and I know I’m not alone or the only one working like this. Whether you choose to do milestone payments whereby a percentage is paid upon launch (ensuring it’s a majority percentage) with say 5% balance left over as a fixing fee for any bugs or errors they might find. Or whether you take the stance that if a website is live, the client is happy with it, therefore it is signed off and the full balance is due. You might choose to take a different point of view if the site is being hosted on your own server, but on external servers it really is too easy to have a fight on your hands – and a fight that takes up yet more valuable working time and becomes ridiculously unproductive, trust me.

If you do not already take some form of payment prior to launching a site, no matter how difficult you think it might be, I urge you to re-think as I have never lost business due to it. While you are in posession of your hard work and while the client wants posession of their new website, the ball is in your court.

I strongly believe that credit terms should not apply to completed websites unless it’s exceptional circumstances and would be interested to hear your views or how you currently deal with these issues.

Note: As of Monday, I have now been paid for the site and the site is live.