We often get requests to help people build their websites, no surprises; we are, after all, a web design company.

But these requests often have to be translated in some form from Klingon or another foreign language, as it often feels like the potential customer is paying a fleeting visit to planet Earth.

Some examples:

“Hello, I would like to start an advertising business (sic) that allows me to generate money while people browse my website. The problem is that I simply do not have enough information about Enzine.”

“I need a website that I can use for customers to register and bid online, I also need to have a feature where users can buy tokens.”

“I want to have a search engine, graphic and web software. If you can’t, you can’t design the software for me, how about you give me a search engine quote? I only want 5 pages and the rest I’ll do it. I’m a web designer , so it is difficult for me to design a search engine for myself. “

We also get requests from people who want to have Facebook clones, eBay-like sites, or a ‘Amazon-like’ shopping cart.

One of the biggest problems seems to be unrealistic expectations of what a website can or cannot do, and how much it will cost.

What people don’t realize are some of the following factors:

1. It is much more difficult to “make money online” than other people want you to believe. It is in the best interest of internet marketers and other ‘gooroos’ to make you believe that making money from a website is very easy. The hard truth is that making a profit from a website is really difficult, especially one that aims high. Even wildly successful internet efforts like Facebook and Amazon took years and years before they started to show profits.
2. In many cases, people simply don’t know enough about the Internet and how it works to start such a business successfully. That does not mean that we are disparaging people who want to start companies like these. We all have to start somewhere, and even Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg at one point didn’t know anything about the internet or websites, but come on … there is a wealth of information available today as well as these sites that can be use. as case studies. How much did it cost to implement Facebook? Angel investors are said to have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the site. Then we get requests from social media sites with clear ‘I want to make millions’ aspirations behind and when we try to understand the client’s budget it’s in the region of around $ 1000 if we’re lucky.
3. People seem to really think that building the site is enough. They suffer from the classic “build it and they will come” fallacy. There is no clear understanding of what it takes to drive visitors to a site, or how to market the site, whether online or offline.

This leaves us, as a web design company, with an ethical dilemma. Do we implement the site and leave the customer to their own devices? A version of ‘take the money and run’? Or we tell the client that their brilliant idea is never going to fly. Unfortunately, that means we’ll probably go out of business too, as roughly 50% of the websites we create are based on some crazy business idea. The other alternative is to act not only as a web design company but also as a consultant, providing advice, coaching and guiding the client. After all, that’s really what clients expect from a web design company, isn’t it?

The question is: how much is this tip worth and how does it fit into the business model of the web design company? This kind of advice and consulting takes an inordinate amount of time and effort, and working that into the cost of a website tends to drive up costs even more – try working those costs into the ‘new social media site that will merge Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which will be called YouTwitFace, site ‘and see what happens to the costs of the website.