Over the years we’ve spotted a number of tell-tale signs that will indicate whether or not you’re being ripped off by your web design company. But surely it should be obvious?
Unfortunately it’s not, because most business people are not web experts and they expect their web company to look after them.
Often the web companies themselves don’t even think twice about this stuff, because its always been done this way.
Well, companies are being ripped off at every point in the process and we’re going to show you how they do it, why they do it and how you can stop it from happening to you.
Standard stuff this – ‘building websites is difficult and you need to hire the best’. The truth is building websites is easy. Building websites that work, is harder and often web companies ignore this anyway.
Don’t fall for their schtick. You get what you pay for is olde worlde talk that perpetuates the status quo – in this case a business model that’s designed to lock you in and extract the maximum amount of money from you every step of the way.
2. Our Content Management System has been designed for ease of use.
A Content Management System is vital to the workings of a website. A web companies own CMS has been built to make life easier for them, not for you. Ignore this – go for a standard CMS like WordPress, you can do most anything with it. If you take their CMS you’ll have to pay a license fee. In some cases this can top 4K a year. If you fall out with the web company, or they go bust, how do you support your old website?
3. Open Source Content Management Systems like WordPress are inherently insecure.
Try telling that to Sony, or Disney or The New Yorker. Another myth because they want to charge you piles of money for ‘enhanced’ security that isn’t.
4, The keep telling you about the lengthy and costly and mostly unnecessary design process.
A traditional web design company will design a website on paper first with block diagrams followed by nice coloured drawings. Once you have signed off these ‘static’ designs they’ll go ahead and build a first draft. This was done in the days when building the actual website was time consuming and based on html code. Nowadays you can build websites online so you can see exactly what the design could look like, with transitions, working menus etc. However, if you want to pay for all the design work go ahead – it can cost tens of thousands of pounds.