The Two Million Dollar Website
The corporate design field is somewhat unique. It is a field on which nearly every successful business in the Western world depends, yet is simultaneously one about which very few people are actually educated.
The issues are alarming, to say the least.
On the one hand, we have the dime-store design trend chipping away at the integrity of the industry, and the amateurs passing themselves off in the marketplace as legitimate professionals, who happen to think that $10 is a fine price to charge for a thoughtless, conceptually barren logo, assembled from clip-art on stolen software. This is all exacerbated by the actual professionals who succumb to pressures to lower what was a fair market price, in order to compete with contenders whose qualifications, process, and quality of work are not nearly in the same league.
And at the other end of the spectrum, we have the monolithic “big boys” who pad their rates so egregiously it would make Donald Trump cry. I’ve heard far too many stories and anecdotes about companies who have paid six figures for a finished product that wouldn’t pass mustard as a first draft coming from a junior designer here. And of course, we’ve all heard about a certain governmental organization paying over a million dollars for a slight logo redesign.
In the middle, we have the rest of us: the quality-driven, honest design companies trying to fight the damaging effects of these two extremes.
Most recently, the website for the State of Wisconsin’s Campaign Finance Information System was brought to my attention.
It was brought to the attention of others too, but not principally due to its outrageous price tag. An article in the Dec/08 Journal Sentinel casually mocked the site for featuring a photo of the wrong city on its homepage. But though the article claimed the site cost the state’s taxpayers “nearly a million dollars” to build, documents obtained by Open Records Request showed the actual price to be more than twice that.
Let’s take a look at this fabulous, two million dollar site…
Really?
Putting aside the student-level design for a moment, I thought, maybe there’s some ground-breaking, reality-defying technology going on under the hood. But no, it’s your run of the mill, standard build.
Thanks to Dan Cody of Wisconsin (who made the ORR), we were able to take a closer look at the actual proposal data. For a rather standard website with an already well-defined plan and set of criteria, the awarded firm quoted such numbers as the following:
• 120 hours to write their own project plan
• 280 hours to code MSWord document upload/download functionality
• 1900 hours for project management
And obviously, this is just one slice of the pie. What I’m left wondering is, who was responsible for making the decision to hire this firm? And where is the oversight?
What’s truly upsetting here is the fact that had the company not used the wrong skyline image, this would likely have never come to light. Honestly, this is only one example of many.
The quoted cost for this specific website should have been a fraction of what it was, but the dishonesty of one vendor combined with what can generously be assumed to be the incredible lack of knowledge on the part of the client has resulted in a situation of which both parties should be ashamed.
In general, you do get what you pay for… but only up to a point. Beyond that, you’re just a chump. Corporate services is very much a buyer-beware arena, in which not many buyers are as aware as they should be.
