Customer Education

A big part of my job is educating my customers. For those of you who don’t know, I am a web designer. I built the very site you are looking at. Anywho, back to what I was talking about. A big part of my job is telling the customer what they want, because most of the time they don’t know what they want. They think they do, but in reality, they have almost no clue about what can be done with a website, or what makes a good site. Things have to be taken into consideration. Who is your audience? What kind of information are you presenting to your audience? Do you want your audience to be able to use your site and not just view it (i.e. e-commerce, user accounts…). And then there is the cost to do all this custom. Even for a small site (5 pages) it can take a lot of time. For a basic site, after meeting with customers, working on the design of the site, coding it up, testing it, and launching I will usually have at-least 40 (usually more) hours of work involved. It’s not an easy thing to do a full custom site. So when I give a customer a quote, usually much less than my competitors, they are still often shocked. Again, this is because the idea of web design is so new that most people have no clue what it takes and what it costs.

So, I spend a great deal of time educating my clients. And for the most part it’s not so bad. I enjoy getting the caught up and teaching them about what it is exactly that I do. But every-now and then you get these people who just don’t understand and thing your full of bull crap, that your over charging them and that they can go somewhere else and get what you are offering them for much, much cheaper. I had one of these about a week ago. The client had no education in computers in general. They had no idea about web design and what it takes. They wanted an e-commerce site for their business and they wanted it to be awesome and better than all of their competitors sites, but they didn’t want to pay very much. The entire time I felt like I was haggling with them. I cut them some deals, tried to meet them half way. In the end I guess they went with some guy who said he could do what I was offering for less, even though he had no clue what I was offering. It was all a little frustrating.

At the end of the day though I guess that is just the way my line of work. Anytime you are doing custom design work for people you are going to half to educate them. And whenever you are educating people, you are going to encounter those students who are stubborn, and just don’t want to listen. I’m just going to have to get used to it.