One Lourdes Dormitel

Now online. www.onelourdesdormitel.com. If you need a dormitory, an affordable place to stay or crash if you don't know anyone in Iloilo, this is the place.

A Basic Website

I've been receiving a lot of inquiries about website design lately. Possible clients start by asking questions about packages, about prices of websites I have previously designed and what they could get with a named budget. If they can't afford my rates - which I really think is quite reasonable since I do customized work, they start asking for the price of a basic website. Which I don't understand.

A basic website to me is a page with text - no design. Basic to me means a skeleton site. White page and black same sized-text arranged in columns and rows. For a basic website, you really don't need a designer. You can just get a basic template and design it on your own. Here's an example of a basic website. Anyone can make a basic website, but I think the reason clients ask for a web designer is precisely because they don't want a basic website, right?

So I did some research on the web. There are website designers who charge lower than Php 8,000.00 (US$200) for a basic website. And a basic website is really pretty basic. It is so basic, it's plain. Those who charge a lot for a website design - with prices so extra-ordinarily corporate are those who have actually made a name for themselves and are breathtakingly good at what they do. And they have every right to charge pretentious fees.

While I don't belong to the latter, I don't enjoy making basic sites because well, they're basic - LOL. I do take pride that I like to work at what I do, take extra pains and thought in my website designs. I like to research my clients, my client's client, demographics, colors and content. I do SEO work even when my site is just static. And because they are static, it's also the reason why they are cheaper than corporate interactive sites.

So why do my sites cost the way they do? I review the hours I spend to come up with a concept, do research and design a site in Photoshop. I count the hours to do customized graphics, play with ideas. I add the fraction of study and experience I had done to experiment and learn coding, software and on what makes a website effective. And I finally throw in the overhead of electricity, tools, rent, ISP, phone calls and text messages, transportation fees and time spent on emails, bookkeeping and administrative tasks. I really can't charge basic fees because I don't like making basic websites.

I just love what I do. And I want to be paid enough for the effort I put in my work.

Anyone can make a website. Not everyone is asked to make one. And if you are lucky enough to be asked, make sure you name a price you can live with. Take pride in your work and don't allow people to bargain on something you do best.

Let me leave you with a quote from someone who understand passion for work done:

To a client who once told me, "It shouldn't take you more than 20 minutes to do this. Why are you charging so much for so little work? My response was: "It takes 20 minutes because I have 20 years of knowledge and experience to back me up."
-Tony D. Clark
www.successfromthenest.com

Entrepreneur

I was asked to do layouts for the Entrepreneurial Exhibit for Semana Sang Iloilo. It's a series of posters that showcase the wide variety of products available in the Province of Iloilo that has been integrated in among our people and embedded itself in our culture by showing up in the different festivals and events in each municipality.

The exhibit will run at the Provincial Capitol Lobby from April 13-17, 2009. This is in cooperation with the Provincial Archives and Library and the Provincial Tourism Office. Come visit. Here are the pics of the layouts.

Click on the image for a larger view.



This is the layout that won over the two other layouts I posted earlier. As I said, I have been listening to a lot of Coldplay and The Script when I did the three layouts so a lot of grundge was needed. Of course I had to explain to my supervisor why the font look like scraped paint - hehehe.