Freebies

Ok, I'm going to vent here. You may not agree with what I am going to write, but it's my opinion.

Back in 2004, I started the Cereal Festival website, the Taste of Battle Creek, and the International Festival of Lights (IFOL) here in Battle Creek.

I did these websites for free. I spent a lot of my time in the summer doing the Cereal Festival and the Taste of Battle Creek websites. I spent so much time on these two sites in the summer, that I didn't take on any new customers during the summer. Shame on me.

Then along comes this new festival coordinator who was going to work with me and get things going so that these festivals made MONEY, and could eventually afford to pay me.

To make a long story short, she "took over" around October of 2006. At least that's when I started to get some contact from her. I really thought that she understood the power of a website, boy was I wrong. She took a website that I had 'corePHP' design for me and said that it wasn't "fun enough".

Wasn't fun enough? How many websites out there do you know of that your child can sit down and write a letter to santa... AND GET A RESPONSE?! IMMEDIATELY!

I don't know what planet this gal was from but I'm pretty sure it wasn't earth.

She wanted to change the entire layout of the site. I told her that she is way late for that and that the site would not be as good as the one they currently had. She insisted that we change the site. So we did. She spent more time changing the website than she did doing her job, and in the end, the last I heard, the IFOL lost $30,000.00 in 2006. NICE JOB!

In January of 07 I get a call from this gal, she is all excited about her ideas for the Cereal Festival and the Taste of Battle Creek websites. My response to her was "ok, the IFOL has lost money because you were too busy with the website and not busy enough doing other things that needed to be done for this festival. We tried it your way, now we are going to try things my way. You feed me information that needs to go on the websites, and I'll put that information on the websites. We will worry about redesigning the sites when we have more time and can test everything to make sure that it's better than it was."

Now remember, I'm pretty hard to fire here because I'm doing these sites for free. Then along comes Celebrations of Battle Creek. They wanted me to do another free website. We told them that we would not be doing another free website, but if they wanted to pay us for it, we would give them a discounted rate.

They ended up finding another 2 designers for all of those websites. Celebrations of Battle Creek is still the same (that website is being done for free, and I called to warn these web designers that the city would take advantage of them if they didn't put a limit to the freebies. They understood)

The other websites, well, they ended up paying another web design company because the company said that they could take the websites to a "National Level"

My response "If you want to pay to downgrade the site, feel free. These websites are already at an INTERNATIONAL Level. I have the emails (that they never responded to, but I did) to prove it. I still have emails from South America, China, Hong Kong, Italy, France, Austrailia, South Africa, Finland, Norway, Mexico... The list goes on.

My whole point is, if someone isn't paying good money for a website, they don't take it seriously, if they don't take it seriously, they don't do anything with it, even simple things like updating it to keep it current.

I'm in the business to make successful websites, and in order to do that, I have to charge people for the websites that I create. If my customers do not update their website, I will be asking them to find a different web designer, or they can pay me even more money (a lot more money) and I will do the research to make their website successful.