FreeLists / webproducers / [webproducers] Re: The Magical Mystery Number - justify your existence!

[Chris Hartley <chris.hartley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> While I miss the good old days of $100k websites done by Razorfish
> agencies I can't say that I'm too let down.

Out, but only by a factor of 10.  And we're talking GB Pounds.  Those were
the days indeed, but all good things come to an end.

Great advice though Michael: with marketing budgets down, we are all having
to justify what we do to convince our clients what it is worthwhile and
represents a good way to spend their money.

With this in mind, it is always worth getting a couple of month's worth of
statistics off your client's web-logging package before and after you
complete your work.

If you are getting it right, the improved site should show visitors reading
more pages and spending more time on the site.  It is this sort of empirical
evidence that can convince your next client that it is worth spending more
than they did on the last site they had built for them by the kid down the
block.

Other than this, if you are scrapping for the little jobs, if you can offer
them a better service than they had before (i.e. Content management or even
regular updates or maintenance, client extranets etc) then this may be a
deciding factor.  If you can't compete on price, then you need to offer a
service that they can't get from an interested amateur.

Going back to Michael's final point, here I disagree, although I wish he
were right as it would be a lot more fun going to work:

>I also feel that with broadband being more
> standard that it will become a richer medium which will start to
> require budget items like animators and voice actors (and maybe even a
> video crew) as standard items.

I think what we will all find is that as broadband becomes standard, the
cost of transferring data will increase rapidly, so the need to produce low
bandwidth sites will continue as our users will be literally paying to
access our content.

Currently, there is a huge surfeit in bandwith, and not that many broadband
customers, so most broadband users pay only for the connection and the lease
of the line.  Supply of bandwidth is high, demand is way below capacity
(some enormous fibre-optic links were built by the likes of PSI-Net and
Worldcom), the ISP's are desperate to get people to sign up, therefore you
get data free with a connection.

As more and more people get online, the amount of rubbish flying around the
networks will increase (how many copies of the same lame 5mb mpeg email hit
you from how many different friends?).  Bandwidth is likely to be in more
demand, and even before it is near capacity, our ISP's will start charging
per MB.  

This is standard practice already in the hosting industry, and once we're
hooked on speed, we'll be willing to pay for it.  The problem then is the
end user is effectively on a meter - the more they use, the more it costs.
For our clients too, the more their web server sends, the more it will cost
them.  

Therefore I suspect that the pressures on us to produce low bandwidth sites
for our clients will continue to be there, with very few exceptions.  The
exceptions will be the big media clients (like the BBC) that own marketable
franchises that have the pull to attract users, and the credibility to
ensure that users are willing to pay for the data they haul off home.

For these clients, a video crew and voice actors are already standard.  For
the company with a $5k budget, I suspect that this will never be true.

>Also as the novelty wears out perhaps it will be seen as more of a creative
>medium onto itself rather than a place to shovel content.

The reverse has happened - when the web was new being creative was cool.
Now it really is perceived as just a place to shovel content by company
bosses!

> At long last new media will no longer be
> "new" and this will become a medium for the masses (which it already
> is) - and that is a good thing in the long term.

Let's all not forget, one of the reasons why this is the medium for the
masses is the low cost of access, and the low cost of publishing.  This was
the reason that people took to it in droves, so perhaps the view of millions
of sites, all offering rich media is not too likely to happen soon..

Also, I think we can all safely drop the "new" now: The Netscape browser is
nearly 10 years old, Amazon has been a public company for something like 6
years so this is no longer new.

What does everyone else think?

Cheers

Chris
(ex-razorfish, london)


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