Yesterday I attended the WebXpo event in Sofia, managed by Web & Events. There were plenty of different topics to be discussed on website development, design, usability and so on.
It was a great pleasure listening to the discussion of the website price. Three experts from leading web development/design companies in Bulgaria did a workshop on how prices are calculated, how do they manage different clients and complex tasks etc. All of them mentioned that the higher prices when you recall to company are based on the professionalism that they imply in their products. The whole cycle requires brief specifications, development and design, testing, some usability experience tests, support, SEO and others. Things that could not be accomplished entirely by a small team of non-qualified and experienced developers. This one is a bit tricky, of course, because the companies have higher rates as well and disciplined way of working when the client might need some flexibility at this point. Anyway.
Some of the hot quotes from the event:
“If you have a website for yachts, you don’t need 10K visitors, but 1 buyer.”
“When it comes to support and fixes, relatives suddenly disappear”
“A website could be developed by a company or 2 students in the Technical University, but the probability it would ever be deployed is way higher when working with the company”
“How do you manage changes to the specs?”, “We call the client with the new proposal (changes to contract and price)”
“Content has to be provided by the client, not the company. Otherwise he has to hire copywriters as well.”
“10% of the people use IE6. This would increase the final price with 600lv. You want this or not?”
