Month: May 2010

Someone left me a comment saying they liked my templates. Judging from the name of the commenter,Ola Linardi and the url it looked like a spamment to me. But before I mark a comment as spam, to be fair I check out the site, considering they went to the trouble of providing an address.

First thing I get is an earful from some Bloomberg sounding yappy guy quacking my ears off. I click the volume down to a more bearable whisper. The page is full of hyperbole and whoever wrote this stuff loves caps lock. There’s line after line of 16px text intermittently in bold for maximum eye grabbiness describing the frighteningly insurmountable hurdles of acquiring a Web site in order to get on the $$$$$$ Internet wagon. The text warns us woefully: to have a Web site, “you need a product, you need an online shop to sell the product, you need a copywriter to describe the product, you need a fancy pants graphic designer to design a logo for the site”… and so on. “To get all this you need to spend at least 10,000 bucks”. Cripes! Suicide is better than all of that! But after he’s scared the hell out of us he tosses us a life saver, the sweetie pie and so finally, the sales pitch: “Guess what! You don’t need a product at all! You just need to buy my product! Then you can have a Web site in under 30 milliseconds!!!!!! ”

It takes me anywhere from 8 days to 2 months to hand off a new Web site. Yet because I’m doing what I love to do it doesn’t seem so bad. He makes it sound plain awful.

Obsessive that I am I had to view the source of this gem. Sure enough, no Doc type. Not a huuuge surprise,though. Tables for Layout sites always seem to sneer “we don’t need no stinkin Doc type shnarf, shnarf“.

OK, what’s going on here? This guy is trying to sell us a product that is going to help us have a Web site in less than 30 minutes ( I am assuming he will also host it for us as well as provide a domain name and etc) so that we can sell affiliate marketing things, whatever that might entail. And for all of that we only have to pay him 47 dollars a month. That’s where his pitch starts to sound slightly less than awesome to me. Although it already began to stink once I saw the site. But that’s just me.

Many Web design companies offer hosting. Many Web hosts provide Web design tools a la Site Creator or some such similar doody producing tool. But not many of either have the low hangers to charge almost 50.00 bucks a month for garden variety hosting. What he is asking would end up costing about 1,700 for 3 years. For most hosting you can get a plan for less than 200 in 3 years (if you buy more than a year at a time). Don’t fall for so called Business Plans,either. All that is is 20 a month for no better than a standard plan which can be a little as 7 bucks a month or lower. You’re just paying for the name “Business”.

It does seem like when hiring a Web designer or firm you can either get a site that looks the way you want and that does what you need for a reasonable amount of money or you can get a site that looks like crap and works like crap and cost a ton of dough. I bet a lot of people would rather chew off their own foot rather than deal with any of it. Whatever route you decide to go ( not the chewing off of the feet I hope) please at least take a bit of time to research the kind of site you need according to the needs of your actual business. Form follows function but there isn’t any reason you can’t have both.