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We have a cool time-frame schematic in our website proposal documents. It shows a time-line where, if all goes well, the customer can have his 'five page' website up and running in two and a half weeks. It works like this: We get all the content, the design ideas, the logos and the deposit on the Monday of the first week. We develop the site and put it on a test site. The client takes a week to review the site. They give us their changes and fixes through at the end of the second week. We fix the small problems; they quickly review the site and viola! We invoice the client, upload the site and the contract is done. Why does it never work out like this? Why, in some extreme cases, does it take more than a year to implement a small-ish website. To extend the time-frame to more than a year really does seem extreme, although it has happened, but more commonly, this type of website can take anything between 5 weeks and 5 months to implement. Why is that? Here are some reasons: 1. The '5 page website' is not really a '5 page website'. Clients sometimes have a very warped perception of what constitutes a 'web page'. We had one client who sold 'one product' (diamonds) and therefore the site was going to have 'one page'... With e-commerce sites, we do not even really work with 'pages' since each product will have its own page, but these product pages are not laboriously loaded one by one. The shopping cart system normally has a method of importing products and can generate pages on the fly. On the other hand, clients sometimes give us one document with the biographies of each of their directors and expect us to put this on 'one page'. In the mean time, they want a page with a collection of photos, and if you click on a photo, it opens a detail page containing the biography of the person. For some reason, these are not considered different pages by the client. Very often then, the scope of the site is quite a bit bigger than what the client led us to believe originally. 2. The content is not ready! This is the number one reason why websites get delayed. Clients approach us to say that they want a website. We discuss the site. They are happy, we are happy. They even pay their deposit. Then we wait for the content. And we wait. And we wait. We follow up, we offer assistance, but somehow, clients always underestimate how long it takes to get their content together. Or even worse, they think that it is our job to do that. If we then explain that we are happy to do it, but we will have to charge them for it, they are normally quite taken aback. The other scenario, which is worse, is that we get the content in drips and drabs. In our contracts we state that we do not start the site before we have received the content. In practice this is sometimes very difficult to keep to. For example, we receive an email with a word document, with a promise that they will send the photos separately the next day. We start. The photos don't come. Then the photos come after a week has gone past. With an additional document that they 'forgot' about. We schedule a meeting to discuss the additional work. We quote for the additional work. They go away and think about it. In the mean time, 2 or 3 weeks go by... 3. The clients get busy and don't test. In this scenario, we create the test site and we let them know where to go and review the site. We also confirm that they have one or two or three weeks, depending on what was agreed upon and the scope of the site. We don't hear from them. We follow up. They got busy with their business, but they will get around to it. Can we give them another two weeks? We do that. At last they review the site. They send through a list of 'changes'. These changes are brand new requirements that were not part of the original scope. We let them know that these are out of scope and that we can implement them, but that it will cost extra. A battle ensues. 2 to 3 weeks go past. We reach a compromise. We implement the changes; we put the site into test again. They get another 2 weeks to test. They come back with change requests. We don't understand what they mean. 'The spacing between the images seems to be related to the size of the image, can't it be a standard size?' We email them to ask for clarification. Time goes by. They come back with more details which we then duly implement and ask them to review. More time goes by without any feedback from them. Suddenly the client phones out of the blue and complains that we promised that the site will take 3 to 4 weeks to implement and it is now 3 months later and they still don't have a site. This leaves us with a conundrum. We really CAN implement websites quickly if all goes well, and we have even done so for clients. On the other hand, clients do not seem to realize that the time-frames involved in creating a website has as much to do with them as it has with us, nevertheless, yet in the end, it all seems to be the fault of the web design company. In the end it comes down to project management. The problem is that if you cater for the small to medium enterprise market, a project management overhead, explicitly costed for or worked into your costs, adds to the overall cost of the project and often pushes the costs of the site out of the price range that the customer is prepared to pay for. Even worse, they then compare your costs with other companies who have not yet run into this issue and who leaves out the overhead cost of project management, or worst of all, they get their neighbor's son to do the site. He is so good with the Interweb after all! The successful web design company in the end is not the one that can build the best website, but that can manage their clients and the time-frame of the project to such an extent that it does not impact on the cash flow of the company or disappoint the expectations of the client - a difficult tightrope indeed!
Article Source: http://www.onlinearticlessite.com
Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you, a website design and hosting company specializing in building cost effective websites for small business owners in South Africa.
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