By Karen Morrill-McClure

Recently I got sucked into this situation: a client asked for a quick estimate on a catalog site. I gave a quick, off the cuff estimate, assuming just a home page, listing the products for sale, and an individual page for each product, driven by a database of all the products. I’ve made a couple of sites like this, using Paypal to take orders. They’re pretty easy to set up and they work well for a simple online store.

The client said go ahead, so I asked some questions about who the audience of the site was (and didn’t get real firm answers, which should have been a warning sign in itself). I make a rough layout and send it to the client and get back some notes on the layout talking about customer sign in.

What?

It gets a bit worse, actually. I try to communicate that my original estimate didn’t include a customer sign in function. Turns out the client really wants this and a flash mp3 player and downloadable lyrics. Hmm, this is turning into a complicated site.

So, I take a day to come up with a detailed estimate (after asking a few more questions) which is much more than my ‘off the cuff’ estimate. Send that off, looks like it’s too rich for my client’s blood.

A few days wasted, a lot of unnecessary stress to me, and what did I learn? That there’s no such thing as a quick estimate. I really need to ask all the questions up front, get the answers and make a detailed page map of the site. Only then can I make an accurate estimate.

The fact is that I craft websites, each of them is different. Yes, I know how to code efficiently, that helps me save time, but I don’t create cookie cutter sites and therefore I can’t give a cookie cutter estimate.

And I like working that way. I don’t want to make template sites, I want to make a handcrafted website for my client that will meet their needs and the needs of their clients in the best way possible. I like learning about their businesses and taking that knowledge and using it to design their sites. I don’t like being left out of the planning and designing loop.

But that means that my estimates take time to make (and they’re still not as accurate as I’d like them to be).

Once I got the detailed estimate out there, my client could see exactly what we were talking about in terms of time and money and then decide whether they wanted to hire me to make that site or not. And if we moved ahead with the project, I would know exactly what I was building. I always prefer having a nice map of the project and I suppose that’s what my detailed estimate really is and I have to remember that it’s worth the time to stop and make that estimate, would have saved me time and trouble if I’d done it at the start with this project.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.