How Long is a Piece of String?
Posted On: 2007-05-16
That seems to be a question that I've been contemplating over and over again in the last ten days or so. How much will you charge me to do this job? How much will you charge me to do that job? How much will you charge me to build a website? How much should I charge you for the domain name you want to buy from me?
And it has gone on and on and on. The domain name is a perfect example; a mainstream client is setting up a new business and a month or so ago had us go through all the major variations of his trading name and buy the domain names. We were able to obtain all but one and of course that one was the one the client thought was most important.
Today he asked us to see if we could negotiate the purchase of that domain name and of course we could ... except for one slight problem. The guy who owns the domain name, another businessman, doesn't know what the domain name is worth.
It has no traffic, it's not being used for anything and probably never has, it doesn't even seem to be parked anywhere so it basically has no more value than the cost of registering the name for a year. However, our client wants to have it for his new business so there must be some value there ... but how much value? We don't know, it's a new business that hasn't sold a singe thing so how do you assess the value?
To make matters worse the owner of the domain name wants us to suggest a value. I think we'll put our client and the owner in touch with each other and let them work that one out for themselves.
On another occasion we had an interesting discussion with a local businessman who was getting the run around from the web design business he had approached to build his website. They had reached a point in the design and then stopped for no apparent reason.
While he understood that we couldn't take over the work unless he was able to recover the graphics that he had already paid for he didn't quite understand why we couldn't give him an idea of what we would charge to build his friend a website. It was only a basic website ... only a couple of pages ... perhaps like the one we recently completed for another business ... or at least that's what he thought.
Did he own the business? Did he have a feel for the business? Did he know what was important for that business? Did he know what his friend wanted on the website?
Well thankfully he could answer that last one ... in a vague sort of way. And even in a vague sort of way it was obvious that it was going to be nothing like the site we had just completed. There were a lot of pages and there was some fancy scripting and there was ... a hell of a lot more involved than the site we had just built for someone else.
Of course you might be thinking that we shouldn't expect anything more from mainstream clients and over here in adult everyone is a whole lot more in tune with what's involved to complete a task. We once thought that way too.
The fact is that over here in adult, people have no idea just how long a piece of string is either. Sometimes it's more a case of a potential client trying to get people to produce work for nothing but more often than not it comes down to the fact that potential clients fail to understand how much time is needed to turn their vision into reality.
So on both sides of online marketing people have no idea of how long a piece of string might be and that can be disastrous. If you jump into a project before you have stopped to consider just how much you might have to spend to bring the project to completion you may find that your wasting your money.
Even if you have taken the time to plan your project have you been able to explain the project to those who want to work on it? Have you and those whose services you want to employ used language that you both understand?
A couple of months ago I talked to a client about movie clips. To me a movie clip is something around 10 to 20 seconds in length but today I found out that his interpretation of a movie clip is anything up to two and three minutes in length. That difference in interpretation has had a major impact on a project.
So just to make things even more difficult not only do you need to know how long a piece of string is but you also have to hope that the person you're talking to measures string in exactly the same way as you do.
Now I bet you never knew that something as old-fashioned as string was important when it comes to doing things online did you?