I’ve often won­dered why it is that peo­ple don’t under­stand the axiom, “You get what you pay for.” Peo­ple who don’t under­stand a process uni­ver­sally seem drawn to the low­est price. In the case of a known quan­tity, such as a car pur­chase, it makes sense. If you’re in the mar­ket for an iPod, you don’t nec­es­sar­ily need to know how an iPod works to buy one. You can rest assured that the one you buy is almost exactly like the oth­ers of the same model.

What about an unknown quan­tity? What if you house needs painted, or you want to have that iPod we talked about repaired? Now we come to an issue. You can go with the place that offers the low­est price, and you may get lucky. Odds are, how­ever, that you will get what you paid for. About 60% of my clients are what I like to call re-treads. What does that mean exactly? It sim­ply means that they went the cheap route and decided it was too expen­sive. Write this down.

Price is only an issue in the absence of value.

I don’t know who orig­i­nally said it, but I’d love to meet him. Did you write it down? Well, go back and do it. I’ll wait…

Future design re-tread

I recently had a con­ver­sa­tion with a future client who fell vic­tim to this all-to-common issue. She went with a guy who talked the talk, but when chal­lenged played the non-disclosure card. He kept telling her that he couldn’t show her exam­ples of artis­tic work and SEO results because of com­pe­ti­tion issues. This is absolute hooey, but sounds good when you’re on the receiv­ing end. She has recently decided that the bar­gain route was too expensive.

Many poten­tial web design clients have the “instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion” men­tal­ity. They think that arriv­ing at a good design is a triv­ial mat­ter that can be accom­plished in an after­noon. This is FAR from the case. Being able to work Pho­to­shop makes a per­son a designer the same way know­ing which end of a screw­driver to turn makes one a mechanic. I can do some amaz­ing things with Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor, but many of them make for bad design. The dif­fer­ence between a designer and a hack is know­ing the difference.

What hap­pens in nearly every re-tread case is, they eat up most of their bud­get on the bad design and have to pick and choose fea­tures for the re-design. Here’s a quick list of things to help you avoid this problem.

1. Do your home­work: Look at the designer’s port­fo­lio. If there is no port­fo­lio, don’t hire that designer. If the port­fo­lio looks like it con­tains a bunch of work from the late 90’s, don’t hire. If you don’t like what you see in the port­fo­lio, don’t hire. Ask for ref­er­ences. No ref­er­ences… Well, you get the point.
2. Expect good com­mu­ni­ca­tion: If you don’t get a return call or e-mail within a rea­son­able time, assume this will be the norm. If you value com­mu­ni­ca­tion, hold out for a good com­mu­ni­ca­tor. Some techies have bad peo­ple skills. This should be pretty easy to spot.
3. Sign a con­tract: Would you let a builder start con­struc­tion on a house with­out one? So why wouldn’t you do the same for a HUGE part of your busi­ness? If you don’t sign a con­tract, you’re deal­ing with an ama­teur (on both sides).
4. If you see a design menu with prices, run: Pre pub­lished price lists may seem like a good idea, but you get the same results as walk­ing into a tat­too stu­dio and pick­ing a tat­too off the wall. It isn’t yours, and it isn’t unique to your business.
5. Ask ques­tions, expect hon­est answers: No one knows how to do every­thing. If you find a designer who can’t do every­thing you want, odds are he can sub-contract the parts he’s not good at. It shouldn’t mat­ter to you, but dis­clo­sure should. Find out what your designer’s strengths and weak­nesses are. We all have them. If we didn’t, you wouldn’t need a designer. Remem­ber, if the answers you get sound like BS, they prob­a­bly are.
6. Know the dif­fer­ence between Design and Devel­op­ment: Design­ers typ­i­cally do the visual part. Devel­op­ers typ­i­cally make the site do things. Don’t hire one to do the other. Again, ask for the one you really need.
7. Don’t hire a rel­a­tive: Ever… Even if it’s free… Enough said.
8. Tables are dead: No mod­ern designer worth his salt uses tables. If your designer doesn’t use CSS for lay­out, you’ll need to redesign very soon anyway.
9. Expect to pay for ser­vices ren­dered: Ask­ing a designer to “whip some­thing up” and let you take a look so you can decide is like ask­ing a restau­rant to make you a meal and let you pay for it if you like it. What would you expect the waiter to tell you if you asked a ques­tion like that?
10. Don’t make hasty deci­sions: The state­ment, “Poor plan­ning on your part does not con­sti­tute an emer­gency on mine” should be taken to heart. Think things through and real­ize that there is time to do it right. If there isn’t, you’ll invari­ably have to do it again.

You don’t have to hire me, but please, hire some­one com­pe­tent. I have a list… If you don’t under­stand the above, ask me. There’s a handy lit­tle “com­ment” block at the bot­tom of this page. Use it. Is there some­thing else you want to know? Ask. There’s also a con­tact form you can use if you don’t want any­one to see what you’re say­ing. Feel free to go that route.