Tweaking The Budget

I’m thinking about sending this along to every client on a tight budget. It’s sort of my ‘pre-emptive first strike’ on cost over-runs. Maybe it’s asking for trouble. But it’s what every guy who does what I do is thinking.

Good design takes time. I am happy and excited to tweak colours, shapes and drawings all day—on your dime, of course. There are two reasons for this expense:

First off, many people outside ‘the biz’ do not realize that web pages are like jigsaw puzzles. There is a tendency to believe that web pages can be manipulated as easily as a word processor and sadly that is not the case. The reality is that changing almost anything means 20 other elements may have to then be moved/re-sized/re-colored. It would be like if moving your couch 6″ to the left meant rebuilding the book cases right behind it. The couch starts to look pretty good right where it is, huh? That’s web design—everything effects everything else.

Secondly, drawing and photo-editing either takes time or costs money. It’s easy to forget this because there is just so much stuff out there on the web. That stuff either needs to be licensed (shocking!) or tweaked to fit in with your design. And again, it’s just not a question of “cuttin’ n’ pastin'” something off of some other guys page.

Large clients understand all this, not only intellectually, but have had years of training to anticipate such costs. Plus, they have the deep pockets to pay for any changes they want. That’s called ‘a budget.’ Small clients usually do not have a real budget. So a certain amount of education is required on my part. Now sometimes y’all get slightly annoyed when I tell ya that the ‘little tweak’ you need will take two hours. But this is not me trying to make another boat payment. It is the compromise between having a cheap ‘templated’ site and a truly ‘custom’ site. In other words, it’s the old 80/20 rule: The last 20% of tweaking is what really adds to the price.

Unfortunately, 99% of human beings cannot really know how they’re going to feel about their site until I show it to them. After every revision, most people see two other things that could be tweaked. And also unfortunately, that little voice in the head says, ‘this probably takes five minutes, right?’ And then the friction begins when I have to say, ‘No, that’s more like an hour.’ It just doesn’t feel like an hour!

Ultimately, it all comes down to trust. You have to trust that whoever you work with is not ‘milking’ you for every dime. But just as important, a good designer does everything for a reason. So when something doesn’t look ‘good’ to you, it’s appropriate to give him/her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s an honest mistake, but often it’s that the designer is giving you what you need, as opposed to what you want. But that’s a whole ‘nuther topic.