Tag: strategy

  • The hidden costs of website software subcriptions

    According to Freshbooks, an invoicing software provider, the average hourly rate for a web developer is $75 and the average price for a website is about $5000. Both clients and developers can easily find the going rate for web development and use this information to get the best outcomes during contract negotiations. Though sometime ago, clever people started offering subscription based service where you pay a certain amount per month and get access to general purpose website builder software. This approach allowed developers to have a small yet steady stream of income and offload the cost and time of desining a website directly to the clients themselves.

    More frequently, our proposals for traditional websites are rejected for low cost website builder platforms. So as the industry changes we are also looking for ways to adapt. Given our status as a small agency, its difficult to build and maintain the economies of scale it takes to maintain a service to hundreds or thousands of customers paying a monthly subscription and frankly its not where we see ourselves thriving. We love the hands-on approach of seeing the visions of our clients come to life and the personal connections that fuel our creativty.

    So would you rather pay $5000 upfront or $35/mo for a few years? Its seems like an easy answer, but remember the time it takes to actually build a fully working website is completey hidden from subcription based pricing. Our job lately is showing the value we provide in comparison to a low cost SAAS provider. We see ourselves similar to craftspeople or artisans who provide detailed hands-ons work and subscription platsforms as providers of mass produced goods. What type of service would bring the most value to a project? There are situations where you absoutely need an experience woodworker to build a customized set of furniture and there are cases when an off the shelf table from a big-box store would do the job. Its not necessarily a matter of luxury versus convneience. Its more about what best fits the needs of a project and the goals one is seeking to accomplish.

  • What is WordPress and why is it so popular?

    WordPress is website publishing software. In technical jargon you may here it described as content management system or CMS. When WordPress was first introduced to the world, it was was primarly a blog publishing app. Now since blog have lost a lot of their popularity in the era of social media, WordPress is transitioning to become a more general purpose website builder.

    There many many software services that do the same thing as WordPress and some that do it much better. So what makes WordPress special?

    As an open-source software, WordPress is free to use. Yes, there is absolutely zero cost to get the WordPress software. However, you do still have to pay a web hosting company for server space and a domain registrar for a custom domain.

    WordPress also has a huge community of developers that create new enhancements for the core software. These ready-made softwar extentions, or plugins, are very convenient for website developers. This vast library of plugins also saves clients and website owners lots of time and resources.

    Since WordPress is open source, you own your content. Even if you stop paying for web hosting service, you can still set up a WordPress server and your own computer, migrate your website to it, and continue to make edits. With proprietary software companies, once you stop paying for service, you also lose the ability to export and change your content.

    So now you know that WordPress is a website publishing software that makes it easy to create content and publish it on the internet. You also learned that WordPress is well known for collections of feature extentions called plugins that make it easy to customize a website with a wide variety of features.

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