CF.Digital is about a website that solves your business challenges

Frankly speaking, I have been thinking for a long time about the topic on which I will start my column on sostav.ua. After all, they say that you don't get a second chance at a first impression, right?)

And I want to write about something that is relevant, interesting, and most importantly, close and familiar to each of us. Therefore, in my first (it sounds so exciting!) article, I allowed myself to reflect on why, for an ordinary client in the domestic market, the price of a service is higher than its value and why they all chase savings.

Each of us, at least once in our lives, has run from one store counter to another in search of a lower price for a particular product. And some of us, in the pursuit of profit, sometimes go overboard. But no, don't get me wrong, the desire to save money is quite natural and reasonable, normal and even right, regardless of what position a person occupies on the social ladder and how tight their wallet is.

Working in marketing, I have already met a fair number of people who came to me with websites with an amazing story like: ‘it was Tanechka, an accountant, who advised a neighbour boy, he programmed everything for 10,000 hryvnias’. I call such sites ‘one-day’. Because these ‘boys from the neighbourhood of Tanya the Accountant’ do not plan to, and often cannot, support such projects. And this is where the trash begins. People are ripe for changing the functionality and appearance of the site, but as it turns out, most of these products are simply limited in the possibility of any manipulations and the developer is not able to do anything.

What is the result? I have to spend money on a new website and pay again. There's no smell of savings here, and I'm not talking about wasted money and nerve cells. And as we know, time is money, and nerve cells cannot be restored.

It is an indisputable fact that sometimes a website is nothing more than a page on the Internet that is needed ‘for the sake of it’. Experience and practice show that these times are gone, and modern realities modestly (and sometimes not so much) hint that the Internet is a huge and vast market that cannot be ignored in general, and your representation in it in particular. Wanting to emphasise their status on the road, people do not rush headlong into the maelstrom of an assortment of cheap cars that are far from the object of their lust, but rather take a long and meticulous time to choose between offers, and sometimes even take out loans, as they understand the difference and are willing to pay more. So why doesn't this rule work when it comes to development?

And May's answer is this: it's all about misunderstanding. Many clients do not understand or are not told why they need to pay many times more for a couple of months of work when there are ‘neighbourhood boys from Tatyana the accountant’.

I don't want to use terminology from our professional field of activity, but I will try to draw an analogy with a typical household situation that we face face to face every day. When we buy food, guided by the low cost, we get a low-quality product and, moreover, a product that is dangerous to our health. With the frantic pace of life, we have less and less time to cook, and manufacturers are meeting us halfway: they add substitutes to reduce costs and expenses, preservatives to increase the shelf life and preservation of the product, and spike food with all kinds of GMOs to accelerate its growth and maturation, thereby multiplying profits while minimising costs. As a result, by saving money, we pay with our health, and we provoke unnecessary spending on medicines and visits to doctors. And the truth lies on the surface: you save money not when you buy cheaper, but when you don't buy again.

The same rule should be followed when developing a web resource. When I hear ‘And they told me over there that they would do everything for 2 thousand dollars!’ I always appeal to common sense by asking the following questions

Are you ready to pay extra for the development of a unique design in the future, because what kind of uniqueness can we talk about if your website is lost against the background of resources based on a template that has been used dozens of times?
Are you ready to pay for the website to meet modern usability requirements? I'm not going to open up America to anyone by saying that poor usability is a surefire way to send a potential client into the hands of your business neighbours.
Is a person ready to pay for a convenient and functional content management system and adaptation for all types of devices and browsers so that website administration does not cause repeated nervous breakdowns and that it is displayed correctly regardless of the device and browser used by a potential client? Is a person ready for new expenses when he realises that the existing resource cannot be scaled and developed, and, accordingly, significant investments are needed to develop a new website?

This list can be continued indefinitely, finding more than one argument why you shouldn't be tempted by a low price.

Indeed, a valuable and working product that will be easy to maintain and improve in the future, which will pay off and start making a profit in the shortest possible time, can only be made by a studio that builds its work on the principles of client-oriented business. A studio that builds relationships with the customer not at the level of ‘client-contractor’, but ‘partner-partner’. A studio that is interested in the success of the client's project as much as the client is, and will do everything to ensure that it is achieved with its participation. A studio that first of all understands what tasks are faced, what consumer problems will be solved by the product or service provided by the customer in the context of the business segment it represents, and not a studio that simply develops websites.

I am always guided by the principle: ‘Doing well is not enough’. You need to make sure that in the future you have such a credit of trust that people will give you recommendations and advise their friends. ' But this is a completely different story and the topic of my next article.)

As one of my colleagues used to say, paraphrasing the well-known Lev Nikolayevich: ‘All owners of expensive and high-quality websites are happy in the same way, and every owner of a cheap and low-quality website is unhappy in his own way.’ However, we should still pay tribute to the fact that an ideal website is not a website ordered for a million dollars. An ideal website is a website developed with all the needs of a business in mind, because a website is one of its key tools. What is the main requirement for this tool in our case? That's right, it should make money for its owners

Drawing intermediate conclusions, we can come to the following conclusion: if your website is not just a ‘tick box’ attribute for you, and you want to get an effective tool for developing your business, do not rush to contact studios with loud statements like ‘a ready-made online store in 7 days at a price of 15,000 hryvnias! ‘. Don't count on ‘free cheese’. When it comes to cost, I always remember the words of my mentor: ‘Numbers don't lie’. A high-quality and non-budget website is cheaper in the long run than a cheap one that requires a whole lot of money to scale, and sometimes even the development of a new one.

So, don't go to those who just ‘develop websites’ at a price you can afford. After all, as Baron Rothschild said: ‘I am not rich enough to buy cheap things’. Turn to professionals with expertise, working with whom you will get a valuable product, the price of which will be levelled by the result.

Allow your business to have a website that will comprehensively solve your tasks!

Bronislav Chumak, Head of new business department at CF.Digital

The material was published on Sostav.ua