In my experience, from day 1 it was clear no one cared about the technology. Sure you'd get some asshole know-it-all types who thought they knew how web design and development worked better that you did but most of the time people would basically say "hey, I need a website that does this and that and the other thing". The technology used was never discussed. All I'd ever tell people was "yes, you can update all of the content and a good portion of the design yourself". People who mentioned technologies were usually just parroting what some other uninformed person was saying.
I'm really curious, it seems a lot of people here may have made this same mistake, talking about technology rather than problems. Is this because you thought it was a selling point or because the client brought it up? Maybe I've just had unusual clients but this entire "problem" never really cropped up for me during my time working as a solo designer/developer.
1) They ask about it, which may be because they know a little bit about it. For example they tried to DIY it and failed, or they have a half finished version another developer did. Or they want to know how big the market is to get someone else to finish the project if you don't pan out for them.
Or they just have heard some vague stuff that they have read on blogs "Is Wordpress or Drupal better for SEO?" as if the choice of platform is going to rocket them to the front page of google...
2) I ask about it. Because sometimes they already have hosting that they want to use, in which case obviously you need to make sure the technology is going to fit that. The hardest thing sometimes is trying to persuade someone that the uber-cheap hosting provider they've chosen sucks and they'd have a better experience is they paid a few more $ a month.
I've been burned by this before, developed a system for a client. Installed it on their server and then found out they don't support PHP5 or PDO or anything even remotely modern and won't enable it for you.
Shouldn't you ask what features the server supports (and what they can enable) before you even start developing? (Or whether you can host it yourself (in the case of websites))
If the client is insisting on hosting the solution (instead of you offering to host it in a controlled environment), then I assume the client has technical people in charge of hosting - and I would make it a point to meet them before I even start development. Otherwise, you'll get bitten needlessly. If they're inflexible (e.g. low PHP version, or no mysql, etc - then you need to incorporate those constraints into your requirements. (Or fire the client)
This is often a red-flag that they're ging to dick you around on other stuff as well.
We have a strong policy about advising clients like this up-front something like: "Of course we're happy for you to manage/engage your own web hosting. Are you going to be using them or us for first level support in case of problems? We're happy either way, and our usual $150/hr hourly rate, but if you'd like us to be the first point of contact you'll need to supply us with details of your support contact at the hosting company, and authority to incur support cost with them when required."
Not necessarily. I've had some very good and well-intentioned clients in the past where they simply registered a domain through goDaddy and didn't know any better, or some other cheapass set them up.
I simply inform them in a candid way what the problem is, and if they're reasonable they'll probably switch services or find a way to accomodate. Otherwise if I detect a tendency for cheapness, then I know there either needs to be a longer discussion or that they are in fact a red flag.
Sometimes it's also a pretty good discussion early on to help to start getting the feel of the type of respect and consideration potentials clients may hold for the consultant's advice.
My exact same first thought as well. I'm surprised that this post isn't a "no duh," but I guess I forget that not everyone understands that what a customer wants isn't a bullet point of features: they want a solution to their problem.
Eons before I got into web dev, I was hocking HP printers in brick and mortar tech stores. One of the things I was taught that I would never forget is that you sell the experience, not the product. It's not an all in one printer. It's a way to get the photos from your vacation off your camera and onto paper. Or a way to privately print your own photos. Products don't exist to be a list of features (if they're good products). They exist to solve problems. The best ones don't even need to be "sold."
Exactly! I think there's this quality that separates entrepreneurial people from non-entrepreneurial people. That quality is to understand what the customer wants. People who naturally think this way do exactly what you do - they sell on value. Meanwhile those who don't have it end up selling based on tech specs.
I don't mean to imply that some people aren't meant to be entrepreneurs. What I am saying is that there's a certain way of thinking that comes naturally to some and allows them to excel at it faster. But the good news is that this is something that can be learned.
I'm reminded of the very stark difference in marketing I see between Apple and any other PC maker. Apple sells you the ability to listen to your music anywhere, use the web easily, get photos from here to there fast, share your life with your family, and on and on. Then whenever I see any kind of PC marketing it's all "processor speed this, screen size that, Gigs of RAM" and features that don't mean much to anyone. Consumers end up doing what a lot of these website clients do when choosing a product. They seek out the thing they were told is good. So you'll see middle aged men in Best Buy saying "I want a Toshiba laptop because I heard it has X gigs of RAM and blah blah" when really there's not much separating that Toshiba from the other cheap plastic laptops next to it. In contrast I've also seen middle aged women walk into a Best Buy and say "I want the Mac that lets me video chat with my son in college". The PCs in the store let you do that too but they forgot to mention it in the marketing because they were so busy droning on about hardware specs.
*In fairness, I've seen the marketing of PCs improve a lot in recent years and it has started to get away from this sort of thing but not enough yet.
Isn't this also a problem with the product that the PC vendors offer?
That Mac comes with Facetime and iTunes. If the PC laptop comes packaged with software, it's generally not the PC manufacturer's own, and they can't guarantee your laptop will be compatible with another.
Well, to be fair, what counts as value to computer enthusiasts is the specification and feature details. I couldn't care less if it comes packaged with some chat software that I'll end up formatting away along with the default OS (except to the degree that it makes the machine cost more), but let me at those specs. I and other people like me respond very well to this kind of features-heavy marketing.
Your point, however, stands. Most consumers really don't care/know much about what the specs mean, and this is very bad marketing to that demographic.
Sounds great. But websites touch everything so you have to get specific. You have discussions about how things will be maintained and integrate. Now these might be scheduled after a sale, but not always. Being vague creates suspicion to me, so you have to show me, I don't trust a salesman with a short list of rounded benefits.
Too bad in retail, the salesman is pretty much gone after the sale. Then you're stuck because the benefit of the technology doesn't actually work in practice because people have specific needs AND some processes are better than others.
So I'm not a huge buyer into the benefits sell. I think it causes people to get lazy about what they need to know about their product and I think it also puts them into assumption mode about their customer, that they don't think deeply, and that they are oblivious to any useful technical details. And those of us customers who have gotten burned before rarely forget it.
With that said, I think leading with the benefits is great, the trouble is, when everyone leads with the same general benefit "it will make x easier" it becomes time to again leverage something to set yourself apart.
I have the opposite experience: 'customers' (in my case, these always have been colleagues from management/sales/marketing) always describe their problem in terms of a solution. Worse, that solution may not even be appropriate for solving their problem.
Famous example: 'we want GPS'. Turns out the need is for navigation by the blind inside buildings (=> poor signal, if any, and a need for one meter or so resolution) or for finding entrances to buildings (that data did not exist 10 years ago and probably doesn't even today. Say, you get out of a bus at a large hospital. Where is its entrance door? Can you even tell what side of the road it is on?)
Sometimes technologies get attributed magical qualities that you cannot get out of people's heads.
A lot of my clients are technically proficient. My biggest repeat client used to cut code for his own web shop, another is a friend who studied Computer Science, another is a startup with a CTO who worked for Google.
Sometimes I wish I had more freedom of choice with technology.
WordPress has become popular enough that many smaller businesses who need a (new) website and do a few minutes of research often come across it. Most of what they read tells them that it's the best platform for their website. They don't really know why, or what WordPress does, but they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website. Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.
The same thing used to happen with Flash. Clients would come to me insistent on having a Flash website, or at the very least, a Flash intro page. This one there does come with an inherent problem. Thankfully, this one has gone to the wayside.
"WordPress has become popular enough ... they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website."
From my personal experience, small businesses really want to just be able to infrequently add or update content. Most of the time, WordPress seems like a huge hammer for small nails.
Can anyone recommend a light-weight system that allows the "regular folks" add or update content without the extras (such as changing "themes", etc)?
WordPress does fit this bill. You can edit user permissions to let the "regular folks" edit the content without seeing all the settings, themes, plugins, etc. If you are handing over projects to a client I recommend giving anyone who updates content on the site an Author or Editor account. The Admin account should be used only for the admin stuff by someone who has an idea of what they're doing.
If you want something lighter yet, I highly recommend http://getkirby.com/ (no affiliation, just a fan). It's very lightweight, runs on a variation of MarkDown, highly flexible, and unlike most of the "static site generators" out there it has a minimal panel for adding and editing content. The $39 per site license is well worth it.
What I'm seeing is people who already have some experience with WordPress, and are accustomed to the admin screens. Any alternative/custom CMSs are seen to be "difficult to use" when compared to WordPress.
i've made several big websites in Umbraco. It's very powerful, but has a bit of a learning curve for both developers and editors. At the moment, both the programming model and the UI are pretty out of date
I know that they are working on a new UI for the backend.
How is the programming model out of date? I am looking at getting into it via the new v6.0. It has ASP.NET MVC support but the CMS itself is still WebForms.
I worked a little in Umbraco on some content on existing installations. I guess if you run a Windows server, it's a good alternative. But I'd recommend ModX or Joomla before that.
You can't really tell your customer to use a cli tool to build the website and upload it with ftp. The whole point of dynamic website cms:es is that the customer easily can update the content themselves.
You missed his point. The fact that a website is generated from a db has nothing to do with how easy it is to update, besides the fact that there exist cms's that both happen to be easy to update and use dB's.
I have had a similar experience with small businesses over the past year. Even if they don't know what WordPress is someone has told them that they should use WordPress.
I position any project as a way to increase business through design, SEO/SEM, conversion rate optimization, but I find frequently that WordPress is a selling point.
Comments
In my experience, from day 1 it was clear no one cared about the technology. Sure you'd get some asshole know-it-all types who thought they knew how web design and development worked better that you did but most of the time people would basically say "hey, I need a website that does this and that and the other thing". The technology used was never discussed. All I'd ever tell people was "yes, you can update all of the content and a good portion of the design yourself". People who mentioned technologies were usually just parroting what some other uninformed person was saying.
I'm really curious, it seems a lot of people here may have made this same mistake, talking about technology rather than problems. Is this because you thought it was a selling point or because the client brought it up? Maybe I've just had unusual clients but this entire "problem" never really cropped up for me during my time working as a solo designer/developer.
It can come up for a few reasons.
1) They ask about it, which may be because they know a little bit about it. For example they tried to DIY it and failed, or they have a half finished version another developer did. Or they want to know how big the market is to get someone else to finish the project if you don't pan out for them.
Or they just have heard some vague stuff that they have read on blogs "Is Wordpress or Drupal better for SEO?" as if the choice of platform is going to rocket them to the front page of google...
2) I ask about it. Because sometimes they already have hosting that they want to use, in which case obviously you need to make sure the technology is going to fit that. The hardest thing sometimes is trying to persuade someone that the uber-cheap hosting provider they've chosen sucks and they'd have a better experience is they paid a few more $ a month.
I've been burned by this before, developed a system for a client. Installed it on their server and then found out they don't support PHP5 or PDO or anything even remotely modern and won't enable it for you.
Shouldn't you ask what features the server supports (and what they can enable) before you even start developing? (Or whether you can host it yourself (in the case of websites))
If you do that, you are talking about technology.
If the client is insisting on hosting the solution (instead of you offering to host it in a controlled environment), then I assume the client has technical people in charge of hosting - and I would make it a point to meet them before I even start development. Otherwise, you'll get bitten needlessly. If they're inflexible (e.g. low PHP version, or no mysql, etc - then you need to incorporate those constraints into your requirements. (Or fire the client)
They don't usually have ops teams, they've just bought whatever the cheapest hosting is usually.
This is often a red-flag that they're ging to dick you around on other stuff as well.
We have a strong policy about advising clients like this up-front something like: "Of course we're happy for you to manage/engage your own web hosting. Are you going to be using them or us for first level support in case of problems? We're happy either way, and our usual $150/hr hourly rate, but if you'd like us to be the first point of contact you'll need to supply us with details of your support contact at the hosting company, and authority to incur support cost with them when required."
Not necessarily. I've had some very good and well-intentioned clients in the past where they simply registered a domain through goDaddy and didn't know any better, or some other cheapass set them up.
I simply inform them in a candid way what the problem is, and if they're reasonable they'll probably switch services or find a way to accomodate. Otherwise if I detect a tendency for cheapness, then I know there either needs to be a longer discussion or that they are in fact a red flag.
Sometimes it's also a pretty good discussion early on to help to start getting the feel of the type of respect and consideration potentials clients may hold for the consultant's advice.
100% agree, I learned the hard way.
It depends on your clients - some of ours do just that, others might actually have ops teams.
My exact same first thought as well. I'm surprised that this post isn't a "no duh," but I guess I forget that not everyone understands that what a customer wants isn't a bullet point of features: they want a solution to their problem.
Eons before I got into web dev, I was hocking HP printers in brick and mortar tech stores. One of the things I was taught that I would never forget is that you sell the experience, not the product. It's not an all in one printer. It's a way to get the photos from your vacation off your camera and onto paper. Or a way to privately print your own photos. Products don't exist to be a list of features (if they're good products). They exist to solve problems. The best ones don't even need to be "sold."
Exactly! I think there's this quality that separates entrepreneurial people from non-entrepreneurial people. That quality is to understand what the customer wants. People who naturally think this way do exactly what you do - they sell on value. Meanwhile those who don't have it end up selling based on tech specs.
I don't mean to imply that some people aren't meant to be entrepreneurs. What I am saying is that there's a certain way of thinking that comes naturally to some and allows them to excel at it faster. But the good news is that this is something that can be learned.
I'm reminded of the very stark difference in marketing I see between Apple and any other PC maker. Apple sells you the ability to listen to your music anywhere, use the web easily, get photos from here to there fast, share your life with your family, and on and on. Then whenever I see any kind of PC marketing it's all "processor speed this, screen size that, Gigs of RAM" and features that don't mean much to anyone. Consumers end up doing what a lot of these website clients do when choosing a product. They seek out the thing they were told is good. So you'll see middle aged men in Best Buy saying "I want a Toshiba laptop because I heard it has X gigs of RAM and blah blah" when really there's not much separating that Toshiba from the other cheap plastic laptops next to it. In contrast I've also seen middle aged women walk into a Best Buy and say "I want the Mac that lets me video chat with my son in college". The PCs in the store let you do that too but they forgot to mention it in the marketing because they were so busy droning on about hardware specs.
*In fairness, I've seen the marketing of PCs improve a lot in recent years and it has started to get away from this sort of thing but not enough yet.
Isn't this also a problem with the product that the PC vendors offer?
That Mac comes with Facetime and iTunes. If the PC laptop comes packaged with software, it's generally not the PC manufacturer's own, and they can't guarantee your laptop will be compatible with another.
Well, to be fair, what counts as value to computer enthusiasts is the specification and feature details. I couldn't care less if it comes packaged with some chat software that I'll end up formatting away along with the default OS (except to the degree that it makes the machine cost more), but let me at those specs. I and other people like me respond very well to this kind of features-heavy marketing.
Your point, however, stands. Most consumers really don't care/know much about what the specs mean, and this is very bad marketing to that demographic.
Sounds great. But websites touch everything so you have to get specific. You have discussions about how things will be maintained and integrate. Now these might be scheduled after a sale, but not always. Being vague creates suspicion to me, so you have to show me, I don't trust a salesman with a short list of rounded benefits.
Too bad in retail, the salesman is pretty much gone after the sale. Then you're stuck because the benefit of the technology doesn't actually work in practice because people have specific needs AND some processes are better than others.
So I'm not a huge buyer into the benefits sell. I think it causes people to get lazy about what they need to know about their product and I think it also puts them into assumption mode about their customer, that they don't think deeply, and that they are oblivious to any useful technical details. And those of us customers who have gotten burned before rarely forget it.
With that said, I think leading with the benefits is great, the trouble is, when everyone leads with the same general benefit "it will make x easier" it becomes time to again leverage something to set yourself apart.
I have the opposite experience: 'customers' (in my case, these always have been colleagues from management/sales/marketing) always describe their problem in terms of a solution. Worse, that solution may not even be appropriate for solving their problem.
Famous example: 'we want GPS'. Turns out the need is for navigation by the blind inside buildings (=> poor signal, if any, and a need for one meter or so resolution) or for finding entrances to buildings (that data did not exist 10 years ago and probably doesn't even today. Say, you get out of a bus at a large hospital. Where is its entrance door? Can you even tell what side of the road it is on?)
Sometimes technologies get attributed magical qualities that you cannot get out of people's heads.
Aren't google working on that problem as an expansion of google maps by asking people to provide building floor plans?
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/floorplans/
A lot of my clients are technically proficient. My biggest repeat client used to cut code for his own web shop, another is a friend who studied Computer Science, another is a startup with a CTO who worked for Google.
Sometimes I wish I had more freedom of choice with technology.
(All of this based on my personal experience.)
WordPress has become popular enough that many smaller businesses who need a (new) website and do a few minutes of research often come across it. Most of what they read tells them that it's the best platform for their website. They don't really know why, or what WordPress does, but they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website. Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.
The same thing used to happen with Flash. Clients would come to me insistent on having a Flash website, or at the very least, a Flash intro page. This one there does come with an inherent problem. Thankfully, this one has gone to the wayside.
"WordPress has become popular enough ... they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website."
From my personal experience, small businesses really want to just be able to infrequently add or update content. Most of the time, WordPress seems like a huge hammer for small nails.
Can anyone recommend a light-weight system that allows the "regular folks" add or update content without the extras (such as changing "themes", etc)?
WordPress does fit this bill. You can edit user permissions to let the "regular folks" edit the content without seeing all the settings, themes, plugins, etc. If you are handing over projects to a client I recommend giving anyone who updates content on the site an Author or Editor account. The Admin account should be used only for the admin stuff by someone who has an idea of what they're doing.
If you want something lighter yet, I highly recommend http://getkirby.com/ (no affiliation, just a fan). It's very lightweight, runs on a variation of MarkDown, highly flexible, and unlike most of the "static site generators" out there it has a minimal panel for adding and editing content. The $39 per site license is well worth it.
What I'm seeing is people who already have some experience with WordPress, and are accustomed to the admin screens. Any alternative/custom CMSs are seen to be "difficult to use" when compared to WordPress.
How about http://get-simple.info/? It works similar to WordPress but it's just a simple CMS.
Anyone have any relevant experience with Umbraco?
i've made several big websites in Umbraco. It's very powerful, but has a bit of a learning curve for both developers and editors. At the moment, both the programming model and the UI are pretty out of date
I know that they are working on a new UI for the backend.
How is the programming model out of date? I am looking at getting into it via the new v6.0. It has ASP.NET MVC support but the CMS itself is still WebForms.
I worked a little in Umbraco on some content on existing installations. I guess if you run a Windows server, it's a good alternative. But I'd recommend ModX or Joomla before that.
a jekyll based site hosted on github, and using prose.io to update the repository.
static html is the way to go these days.
I don't think "regular folks" are going to be creating websites with Jekyll and Github anytime soon.
You can't really tell your customer to use a cli tool to build the website and upload it with ftp. The whole point of dynamic website cms:es is that the customer easily can update the content themselves.
You missed his point. The fact that a website is generated from a db has nothing to do with how easy it is to update, besides the fact that there exist cms's that both happen to be easy to update and use dB's.
I have had a similar experience with small businesses over the past year. Even if they don't know what WordPress is someone has told them that they should use WordPress.
I position any project as a way to increase business through design, SEO/SEM, conversion rate optimization, but I find frequently that WordPress is a selling point.