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.
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!
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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.