The Web Design Circle Of Life

“Sorry, after considering your quote, I’ve decided I’m going to get my cousin’s wife’s brother’s dog to build my website.”

*Rolls eyes*

If you’re in web design (hell, just about any creative industry), you’ve heard this before.

Many-a-job has been lost to a “family friend” who is “just getting into web design” and “can do it real cheap.”

It comes up a LOT in all the Facebook groups for web designers that I hang out in. Usually, people are asking how to respond to a client that says this.

For some clients, trying to convince them that a lower price from a family friend isn’t the best idea, will just never work.

For others, it’s simply a matter of showing them how important a website is in terms of potential business won or lost.

I’ve often preempted this kind of thing by joking with clients before it ever comes up. It’s something I’ve repeated probably 100’s of times at networking events, and it always gets a laugh.

It usually goes…

“For every job that we lose to a family friend, we get another job to fix or replace a website that was built by a family friend. It’s like the web design circle of life.”

It’s not even an exaggeration.

We’ve easily fixed the same number of sites, or more, compared with ones we’ve lost to this universal enemy.

And by “fixed”, I mean we replaced the entire thing because in the end it would have been cheaper for the client.

Originally published at The Web Design Circle Of Life.