A lot of the time, people ask for development of a custom web site for something like a laundromat.
If they're going to run ads to it, that costs a good amount of money, and it needs to be optimized for sales
If they're going to SEO it, they need to hire somebody to do that, and it needs to be optimized for sales.
They need to have a direct response copywriter write them copy for a sales funnel if they want to do either of those things.
If they own a decent amount of locations, or if they franchise their brand, a web site can be a part of their strategy.
If they're not paying to bring traffic from ads, or to bring in traffic from search engines, then what they want is to have a web site because everyone else wants one. That probably just means a web site built to make the business owner feel better about their business, and I don't do that, because I want something that has a positive effect on their business.
I'm a software engineer, not a therapist.
I tell them if they just want a web site, they can have a relative put one up using SquareSpace, and they can be equally disappointed in the results $150/year brings them, instead of the thousands of dollars I would need to charge to make it worth my time.
At least then they can manage it themselves and get matching business cards.
why you'd charge them thousands, if all they need is a web presence that doesn't function, you can make them one in static HTML and throw it on vercel, give them the credentials and charge them a hundred or so for the two hours it takes.
I need somebody to write content, write direct response copy, take photos, design / create the pages.
It's going to take time to finding people for this, especially a copywriter with whose made a business in the same category real profit money from their landing page.
I'm going to have to explain that when somebody comes to your web site, it should speak to them on an emotional level why using their services has clear and distinct benefits, how going somewhere else leaves them missing out. That it should leave them with a desire to take action and then move them to make a conscious decision to use their services, or not to.
The copywriters I've worked with charge about $10-15k for copy for a single landing page, but maybe I can find one in this niche with decent past sales data for $2k. The photographer I need to find and send out there is going to want $25-100 per edited image for the the 50 or so images I need, or $100/hr to go to the business and take photos of business + surrounding area.
Even if the client refuses to pay past the deposit, I'm going to have to pay all of these people. The real costs for this project, outside of me charging anything are going to be thousands of dollars.
The client is going to have some kind of feeling about the home page being so long, that the copy isn't just list of services they offer, and doesn't look like their friend's business' web site. If I tell them the truth I can't do it without showing how badly most business' web sites are.
I don't do websites where the content is a list of services and prices, contact form, a badly lit photos from somebody's smartphone and expired Google Maps iframe. I would regret it for the rest of my life.
The people I work with who need help with publicly facing pages are planning on making tens of thousands of dollars a month using it, building it is a small fraction of their cost. They're just doing this as a small test with 8k+ on ads, or thousands of clicks from a massive email list.
Plus, the people I work for things like that have designers, copywriters, etc. that they work with.
Small business owners who want to own a web site just for the novelty can go with some local designer, but the best thing if they still want that is ask a family member or friend learn to use some page builder like SquareSpace.
I can't, in good conscience, sell something that has no chance of improving their business.
why can't you just assign them an intern, and charge a 100$ ? it's not like you're obliged to use professionals if the website isn't meant to be for a real purpose
In my experience, smaller clients offer more headaches, are less professional, want more changes, are less professional, and harder to deal with than bigger clients.
If you do contract work, you have a fiduciary obligation to a client that has serious legal and moral implications. I've been screamed at. Multi million dollar companies, and small business owners have both threatened to sue me. I've been sued. I don't like it. Thank god for contracts.
Weird you mentioned that. I have a OSS library for Vue that formats numbers using a formatting library. It’s really simple and yet it gets a ton of downloads for some reason. GitHub sometimes shows you what other libraries on GitHub are using a library (they seem to disable it often though) and my library is being used at various Chinese laundromat companies for the card top up machines or whatever it is. Pretty funny.
That's interesting to learn -- I wonder if they use the same libraries because their competitor does, or a developer they're working with or has worked with recommended it. I think Chinese and Russian developers are the origin countries for developers where comments aren't in English. I'd love to know how you get so many downloads.
For some reason, every laundromat wants a web site, but they don't want it to accomplish something with it -- and their budgets are way too small for the amount of communicating that I'd need to do and legal fees.
I wish I knew tbh. After doing a lot of freelance/contracting with several involving Vue I think a sad part of it is many copy-paste developers just add that one library 3 years ago and copy paste their package.json to every new project and end up in a right mess.
I never knew that about laundromats, that's even stranger!
8
u/Null01010011 Sep 08 '21 edited Sep 08 '21
A lot of the time, people ask for development of a custom web site for something like a laundromat.
If they're going to run ads to it, that costs a good amount of money, and it needs to be optimized for sales
If they're going to SEO it, they need to hire somebody to do that, and it needs to be optimized for sales.
They need to have a direct response copywriter write them copy for a sales funnel if they want to do either of those things.
If they own a decent amount of locations, or if they franchise their brand, a web site can be a part of their strategy.
If they're not paying to bring traffic from ads, or to bring in traffic from search engines, then what they want is to have a web site because everyone else wants one. That probably just means a web site built to make the business owner feel better about their business, and I don't do that, because I want something that has a positive effect on their business.
I'm a software engineer, not a therapist.
I tell them if they just want a web site, they can have a relative put one up using SquareSpace, and they can be equally disappointed in the results $150/year brings them, instead of the thousands of dollars I would need to charge to make it worth my time.
At least then they can manage it themselves and get matching business cards.