What level of support will you get from the part-time web design crowd?
Before answering this question, allow me to relate a
little story about Mike, a friend of mine who works as
a professional photographer in the UK.
A few months ago he was approached by a couple in need
of his services for their wedding day. After quoting his price, Mike was confronted with disbelief about his supposedly outrageous prices and a
comment along the lines of: "A friend of a friend of ours said he would do it for less than half
that."
The friend in question was an enthusiastic amateur who
did the occasional photography job on the side for a bit
of extra cash, and no matter how much Mike tried, the ridiculously
low price won out in the end.
A typical scenario you may say, but there is a twist
in this tale.
After covering the wedding, apparently with reasonable
success, the friend’s photo lab suffered a mishap
resulting in the complete destruction of the wedding photos,
along with a substantial amount of other materials. Nothing
remained of the couple’s big day.
It could of happen to anyone, and indeed it
did, to Mike some years earlier.
Being a professional photographer however, Mike not only
benefits from many years of experience, but also from
rather comprehensive insurance policies which, in this case, covered
the cost of restaging the entire wedding down to the last
guest and recreating the lost pictures, thus preventing
a catastrophe for the newly-weds on that occasion.
Unfortunately,
the other couple’s ‘friend’ had
no such insurances.
Although this little tale has nothing directly to do
with part-time web design, it does illustrate the hazards of contracting
part-timers, rather than full-time professionals, to undertake
any given task. And while the physical destruction of materials
is very rare in the web design industry, catastrophic data
loss is an ever-present danger for anyone working with
computers.
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Some part-time web designers may be able to cope with
such scenarios, but for the majority of these operators
(and their clients) they would spell disaster. Professional
web design companies, on the other hand, usually implement comprehensive data
backup routines and have contingencies in place for ballooning
technical specifications; in other words, the client is
covered if things do happen to go wrong.
It pays to remember that the lowest price is not always
the cheapest in the long-run, when thinking about getting someone in the part-time web design sector to build your new website.
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