As some of you may know — I work for, and for that mat­ter, head up, a small web con­sultancy in Liv­er­pool. The company’s Inter­con­nect IT

It’s a funny busi­ness, work­ing the web. We know all sorts of cool stuff to make things work very well for cli­ents, but per­suad­ing them of this is prov­ing to be some­thing of a chal­lenge. I had one chap recently who had prob­ably seen too many of those adverts that offer web­sites for £50 or £100 and so thought he could have some­thing pretty soph­ist­ic­ated for £250.

Well here’s the truth… we could do sites for £250. We could even do very soph­ist­ic­ated sites for that price. But we’d need to sell thou­sands of them, to the same kinds of busi­ness. Why? Because no mat­ter which way you do it, if you’re selling ori­ginal work you’re going to be spend­ing a fair bit of time on it. Few busi­nesses in the UK can get by char­ging less than £20 an hour, so that would mean the site would have to be com­pleted in about 12 work­ing hours. That means everything, the sales/consultation meet­ing, the install­a­tion of the site, the con­fig­ur­a­tion, pur­chas­ing the domain, devel­op­ing the theme (or, if using an old one, re-jigging it for the cli­ent), edit­ing the con­tent to fit, find­ing images, lay­ing it out and then test­ing on vari­ous browser, with vari­ous oper­at­ing systems.

Web­site Workload

Web design, let’s face it, is hard. Browsers are truc­u­lent and buggy, stand­ards a mess, and access­ib­il­ity (ie, can any­body view your site, whether dis­abled or oth­er­wise?) is an issue too. Try and get one thing right, and another thing will break. In the past I could quite cheer­fully put together simple but hard to main­tain web­sites. They worked, everything looked ok, and people made suit­able noises. But by jove, adding any­thing meant a lot of pain.

Now we build sites that are driven by data­bases, wrapped up in soph­ist­ic­ated stylesheets, and man­aged by increas­ingly com­plex pieces of soft­ware. The expert­ise required to get it all just right is sig­ni­fic­ant, yet the rewards appear to be diminishing.

So we have the answer — improved effi­ciency. I think that increas­ingly web design­ers will con­cen­trate on industry niches in order to make the time it takes to build a web­site. After all, if a dent­ist needs a web pres­ence then by and large he’s going to have pretty much the same things to say about teeth whiten­ing as any other dent­ist. Sim­il­arly, many design cues will also be more pop­u­lar within one industry.

It’s only like cars — the very first were quite ran­dom in design, built with spe­cific cli­ents in mind. As time passed, the mar­ket became ridicu­lously com­pet­it­ive. To sur­vive, there was a need to gen­er­al­ise designs… and to pro­duc­tion­ise them. Soft­ware, like web­sites, is a little dif­fer­ent, but this is effect­ively what has to hap­pen now in the web industry. Work out how to do a lot, in as short a time as possible.

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