April 24th, 2009
A great many years ago, I created my first web page. It was an oasis of luminous green dedicated to an obscure band. It lacked animated gifs, MIDI music and blinking text only because I lacked the ability to implement such features. It was, gentle reader, ghastly.
I didn’t see it like that. I had made a web page. An entity known as Geocities tutored me on basic HTML and allowed me to upload my creation to their server and make it available to the world for free. I was a rank amateur, but my ramblings were available to the whole world. Gradually, strangers with a passion for the same obscure band began to approach me via the email link. It was pretty cool, and it set in motion a sequence of events that led to me taking a post-graduate diploma, quitting my job and setting up a web development business. Thank you Geocities.
So now Geocities is going, taking with it many orphaned sites from the 90s featuring the worst of amateur web design. Replacing them is a morass of gaudy myspace pages and a sea of blog pages using the same default template. With the current batch of free blogging tools bringing dull but tasteful templates to the masses, our attention returns to the content… and that is precisely what’s wrong withthe current batch of amateur websites and blogs.
Tags: Web Design
Posted in Internet | No Comments »
April 3rd, 2009
A truism often cited in web development and other professional circles states that if the client’s expression doesn’t alter when they see the bottom line of the quote, then you haven’t charged them enough. It’s trite, and meant to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it does illustrate the yawning chasm that often exists between the developer perception and the clients perception of the value of a website.
Image by helmet13
Most clients understand the work that goes into a website and see it as an investment that will pay for itself many times over through increased leads and sales. Some, however, are genuinely gobsmacked when they hear the price. At Spiralli, we break a project into its constituent components. Some common components will have a standardised price. Other components will need to be carefully costed. In either case, the figure is not plucked from the air, it is carefully costed based on our best estimate of how much time the associated activity will take. By now, we’ve had so much experience costing jobs that our time estimates tend to be very accurate.
((Number of Hours + Small Contingency) X Hourly Rate)
Simple really…
Most people wouldn’t take umbrage to our hourly rate, they’re just surprised that it takes so many hours, particularly on the web development side. It is easy to look at a bespoke image gallery module with an admin backend and dismiss it as a few hours work. If only it was… Components like this can take a full week to develop, depending on functionality. The developer needs to interface with a database, upload, validate and resize images, manage the gallery objects, perform data validation, make the component secure, and add a little javascript and jquery fairy dust. If you haven’t done a task yourself, it can be difficult to appreciate its magnitude.
Another aspect of costing jobs that newbie web developers make is failing to account for the time which needs to be spent on satellite activities. These are the chores that are related to a project but don’t directly result in code being written. I’m talking about liasing with the client, hammering out specifications, and issuing quotes, invoices, statements, etc. Every hour writing code may be associated with another hour of these satellite activities. If a developer spends 30 hours a week coding and another 30 on these satellite activities, then the developer’s hourly rate needs to reflect the fact that while they are working a 60 hour week, only 30 of those hours are paid.
Tags: Web Design, Web Development
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
