Ok, so you’ll see a new cat­egory now under the Asides cat­egory. That of ‘The Company.’

And what’s it going to be about? Well, it’s going to cover the tribu­la­tions, stresses and joys of build­ing up our web design com­pany, Inter­con­nect IT. The updates won’t neces­sar­ily be reg­u­lar, lucid or sane, but they might be inter­est­ing. I won’t even be put­ting them in the highlight’s cat­egory so they show as head­lines — you either have to come look­ing, or you need to sub­scribe to the RSS feed to this site, where the posts will always show up.

Real­istic Pricing

One of the hard­est things in busi­ness is to come up with a price struc­ture that works. You can eas­ily under­price your­self, con­vinced that what you do is actu­ally quite easy, and end up trad­ing like mad without actu­ally ever mak­ing any money. I had an inter­est­ing case this week, where a chap run­ning a fit­ted fur­niture com­pany in Liv­er­pool was inter­ested in a web­site. He’d seen some nice sites from rival firms. Unfor­tu­nately he didn’t have an inter­net con­nec­tion, so we couldn’t review them together, and the 3G broad­band dongle for my laptop is still to arrive. Any­way, we dis­cussed why Inter­con­nect IT is such a great devel­op­ment com­pany, and why he should con­sider us for a site.

And then there was a risk of it all going down­hill. When asked what sort of budget he’d thought of, he came up with the fig­ure of £250. Given that no web design com­pany in the UK can charge less than £45 an hour, he was obvi­ously believ­ing that a site built to pro­fes­sional stand­ards would take about 5.5 hours. Let’s break that down:

Ini­tial meet­ing — 45 minutes.
Design and lay­out typo­graphy for a simple header and logo — 30 minutes.
Col­our pre-defined tem­plate to match brand­ing and export for css — 30 minutes.
Cre­ate new cli­ent dir­ect­or­ies, copy over notes and so on, make cop­ies of cli­ent code — 30 minutes.
Obtain images, with per­mis­sion for use and pre­pare them for the six pages required — 1 hour or more.
Pur­chase domain (find­ing a suit­able name, and get approval) — 1 to 2 hours.
Set up server for the domain, e-mail addresses, secur­ity and so on — 1 hour.
Upload server side soft­ware (all our sites are dynamic), activ­ate any plu­gins and so on — 30 minutes.
Option set­ting on the soft­ware — 15 minutes.
Insert sup­plied text, images and so on, and lay them out smartly — 1 hour.
Test the site on three Win­dows, two Linux and two Macin­tosh browsers — 1 hour.
Invoicing, chas­ing the invoice, bank­ing it and so on — 1 hour.

Now this is for a very very basic site where we’ve done a min­imal amount of cus­tom work. As soon as demands grow, so does the time. And we’re also ignor­ing the devel­op­ment cost of what we’ve done in the past, yet we’re sit­ting on at least nine hours work for some­thing really quite simple. That gives us £27 or so per hour. And we haven’t even talked about the cost of our server, office, equip­ment and so on.

We’ve worked it out, and we could actu­ally do about fif­teen of these sites per month. Our costs, if we were all earn­ing min­imum wage, are about £4000 a month. So we’d lose £250 a month, whilst earn­ing min­imum wage.

So what this chap was basic­ally say­ing to me was that he val­ued our ser­vices at roughly the same level as shelf stack­ers in a supermarket.

But here’s one thing I’ll admit… it’s not his job to work out the value of what we do. It’s ours. And it’s our job to con­vince cli­ents that what we do is both highly bene­fi­cial to their busi­nesses, and very dif­fi­cult to do well.

Book­mark It