Choosing a Web Development Firm – Price vs. Quality

When choosing a web development firm to work with, it is helpful to understand that there are different types of web development firms, and one or the other may be a better fit for you. While there are several categories we could talk about, for the purposes of this post I’ve divided all firms into two categories; those who compete on price and those who compete on quality.

Some web development firms compete almost exclusively on price. They advertise being able to provide you with the website you want for less money than anyone else. The prices you see advertised by these firms are generally in the low hundreds. Other firms compete almost entirely on quality. These firms tend to charge tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands or millions for a website.

There are two important things to understand when you go to choose a firm. First, understand that depending on your specific situation, some firms will be a better fit for you than others. Second, you generally get what you pay for.

If you are a startup and you’re funding your new company on credit cards, you’ll probably end up choosing a different firm than the startup that has $30 million in VC funding. If you own an established company that generates $500K in yearly revenue and has three employees you’ll probably go with a different firm than IBM or Coca Cola would choose.

If you’re a smaller company than you want to go with a smaller firm. The reason is that you want the firm’s attention, and the greater the size of the checks you write that firm relative to their gross revenues the more attention you will get. If you are paying a firm $10K for a website but the firm has receipts of $200K per month then you are not their most important client and you will not get the attention to your project that you want.

Now you might be thinking “Does it really matter how big my project is compared to total revenues? What if I’m the biggest project they’ve got?” If your project is $10K, the firm collects $200K per month, and you are their largest project, what does that tell you? That tells you that this is a volume shop, or a firm that competes on price. They are trying to process as many jobs as possible as quickly as possible. It means their attention is split between at least 20 projects per month. In my opinion, that means it’s hard for them to pay too much attention to any one of their clients.

Does that mean you shouldn’t use that type of firm? No, they might have a great process by which they can turn out 20 projects per month and do good work, or work that’s at least good enough for what you need, even if it isn’t the best work out there. Or they may have their workforce structured such that individuals in the company form small project groups that are the equivalent of small companies, and therefore the $10K project is a decent sized project for that group, even if it’s relatively small compared to the total revenues of the company as a whole.

However, if you’re concerned about quality and you’re spending $10K, you’d be well advised to find a firm that is bringing in $30-50K per month and has a staff of 4-8 employees. In general, this will mean that you will get more attention to your project and a higher quality result.

Where I see people make mistakes is when they assume there is no inverse relationship between quality and price. Of course the volume shops that are offering low prices aren’t going to say the websites they produce are junk. It’s not that they’re necessarily lying, they might truly think their websites are good. Some companies might be successful with the websites they build. It might be enough to get them to the next level where they can afford a higher quality site.

However, some advertising is deceptive, such as when they claim their websites are just as good as the expensive ones the big guys get. Register.com’s advertising is a case in point. If you assume that a company offering websites for $200 is going to give you the same quality of site as a company charging $20K for a website, you will inevitably be disappointed.

The point is, do your research and use common sense. You know the axiom, if it sounds too good to be true… If you want a high-quality job, know that you’re going to pay for it. If you’re focused on results, figure out whether you need high-quality to get the results you need or if a less expensive solution will get the job done just as well. Feel free to ask firms directly if they consider themselves quality shops or volume shops. Or if you want to be more subtle, ask them how many employees they have, how many projects they work on at a time, and what is the average dollar size of projects.