Three isn’t company
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Posted under: Design, Business
There are three kinds of service. Good, fast and cheap. Pick any two. You know the rule right?
This is easy to remember when we offer others our services, however it’s easy for us to forget when we have to commission others to do our work. How does this work in the world of design and web development?
Design
Good design cheap won’t be fast.
Good design fast won’t be cheap.
Fast design cheap won’t be good.
What is good design? Is it design that we feel strongly attached to? Not always. In many ways good design is about 3 things; semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. In other words; meaning, aesthetics and practical application. And those three things have to apply to the audience we’re trying to reach. For example, a design might have a lot of meaning to you and me, but not to your end target.
Design is a process. As the designer, you can’t always get the design right on the first try. Designers use problem solving techniques to accomplish the three aforementioned goals, and this usually requires experimentation and rounds of self-made revisions before it even goes to the client.
Design made too quickly isn’t usually going to have the necessary time invested to balance the meaning/aesthetic/practical issues that are required in order to be considered good design. However if you want the care put into your designs, in order for them to be considered high-quality, that means the designer is going to have some late nights ahead of him/her. And that doesn’t come cheap. After all, designers have families too - and time away from them should be compensated for. Therefore, if you want the design to be it’s best, and you don’t want to pay top-price, then don’t expect a quick turn-around. The designer will probably be more than happy to work on something over a longer period of time for little money if he/she can make it a portfolio piece.
Development
Good websites made cheaply won’t be made fast.
Good websites made fast won’t be cheap.
Quickly built websites made cheaply won’t be good.
Again, let’s define what a good website is. Aside from the design, which was previously discussed, how does the good/fast/cheap rule apply to the technical/usability planning and front/back-end coding of your site?
Developing a website isn’t the same as designing a logo, which is more conceptual than technical. Commissioning a website is more like contracting a house to be built. Building a house must be done in stages. Before you start the wiring, you need a foundation. Before you lay a foundation, you need a blue-print. Before you start painting and decorating, the walls have to be built. Each stage takes time, and must be done in a particular order. Web development is similar. It has several stages, and stage 3 has to be finished before stage 4 starts. If you’re done stage 4, and you want to go back to stage 2, a lot of work has to be redone, and this slows down development. The basic stages of most websites are:
- Accessing the needs of the website
- Usability/content/structure planning
- Design
- Front-end development (ie: stuff you see on the website; XHTML/CSS/DOM controls most of this)
- Back-end development (ie: stuff you don’t see; databases, CMS, forms)
- Content implementation (ie: getting the copy in place, and the pages built)
- Testing
- Launching
If you are at the testing or launch stage, and you want to go back and change the structure of the site, or make a design change, this can slow down the progress of the site. Also, remember that much like the design of the site, which can be good or bad, especially when it comes to usability, the technical side of the website can be good or bad too. If you get broken links, it’s a bad site. If your site breaks in major browsers, it’s bad. If there’s typos, it’s bad. Ensuring that your site is functioning well requires—you guessed it—time!
So the old rule is the same — ensuring your site is functional takes time(and this scales accordingly depending on the level of functionality you require. A simple site doesn’t take as much time as a large site that has a lot of complicated features). If you want your site to have technically complicated features, and work really well, with no kinks - expect either high-costs, or a long development time.
This rule actually works well for the client, even though in a perfect world, we’d all like to have all three. When you want something to be good, paying a fair price and giving it adequate time is insurance that you’re getting a quality service. There are very few circumstances in which you want fast and cheap instead of good. So if you are getting fast and cheap, you should be calling into question the quality of work that you’ll be getting in the end.
After all, you might save money and get it right away, but isn’t it a waste of time and money if it’s is ineffective?
