Anyone know a home builder who will give me a firm price for a home, based on the following specifications?

• Probably between 4-6 rooms
• A kitchen
• One or two bathrooms
• A garage

If I took this to a builder, I’d first expect a strange look and then, if the builder didn’t laugh me away, a long list of questions including stuff like:

• You don’t have a clue what you’re doing, do you?
• Where are your blueprints?
• How many square feet?
• Where is the lot and what is the terrain like?
• Is it brick, siding, etc?
• What materials are we using throughout? Granite or formica? Tile or laminate?

I’m no home builder so those probably aren’t exactly the questions the builder would ask but you get the drift.

We frequently receive the web-equivalent of this request and it baffles us. And, as usual, stuff that baffles us ends up on my blog. If you have thoughts from either the client or the vendor side of this, I’d love to have you comment below!

A Too-Common Request

Here’s an example of the kind of thing we’re often asked to price:

• 15-20 pages, editable by the client
• login area
• e-commerce
• newsletter sign-up

Sure, we can provide a range for a request like this, but the range is going to be something like $5-100k. Just like the home builder needs some details, it’s very difficult for us to accurately estimate a project with such vague parameters.

You Can’t Tell Us What You Don’t Know

Now that I’ve complained about the problem, let me tell you why I think it happens: lack of experience/knowledge. Most people haven’t ever requested an e-commerce site so they don’t really know what’s involved. With brochure sites, lack of experience isn’t a huge problem. But when a client is requesting something like e-commerce, the lack of detail provided to us becomes problematic.

It’s Custom, Not Boxed on a Shelf

If you want to buy an off-the-shelf website you can easily get a price. Why? Because it’s all boxed up, sitting on a shelf ready for purchase. You buy what’s in the box and that’s all you get. When you open the box you might discover that it doesn’t offer the shipping options or the product display options you need, but that’s too bad. You didn’t pay for a custom site, you paid for whatever was in the box.

When you buy custom development, like that offered by my Utah web development firm, there isn’t a box. Custom web development isn’t packaged, ready for purchase. The price depends on what you want and “e-commerce” isn’t an adequate description of what you want. It’s like walking into a restaurant and asking how much “food” costs.

Why is the Budget a Secret?

Clients seem to be afraid that revealing their budget will result in being swindled out of all of their money. When people ask me how to choose a designer, a developer, or an agency, I tell them to start with “trust”. Unless the client is experienced, in the end they’ll have to trust someone, and choosing the lowest-priced option doesn’t always mean they’ve chosen the most trustworthy option.

The “secret budget” may also result from feeling that announcing the price limit automatically means they’ll have to spend 100% of that budget, when they’re really hoping that someone will bid much below the budget. Trouble is, what are they going to get for that low bid?

If you tell me that you have $10k to spend, I’m going to tell you how to get as much as possible for that price. If you’re keeping that number a secret because you hope to only spend $5k, then you should just say that $5k is your budget.

Again, this all comes down to trust. If you trust me, you’ll know that I’m going to do what’s best for you within the budget you’ve outlined.

Risk Mitigation = Estimate Padding

When you’re unwilling to reveal your budget, our only option is pad the estimated price to account for risk. What risk is there, you ask? the risk is that you want more than what you’ve stated. Or, more accurately, that you’re expecting more than what you’ve stated. You said you want simple e-commerce. But in your mind, simple e-commerce is like Amazon. In our mind, simple is like a PayPal button.

In truth, a client who doesn’t understand the ins and outs of the web design and development process isn’t really qualified to define the scope of their project at the level we require. We’re always going to get imperfect requirements from the client, and absent a budget, we’ll have to make assumptions and guesses as to what the project will really involve and pad the price to account for the unknown.

This is a bit of a rant, I know. And I realize that things probably aren’t going to change anytime soon. But, if you have suggestions for how to deal with this issue, please post a comment for those of us who are still searching for the answer!

Google announced another update to the search engine results pages. They’re now including information about a result’s location in a site’s hierarchy, rather than merely showing the page’s URL.

Here’s an example of what the new results will look like. The new feature isn’t yet live for everyone but Google says we’ll all see this feature within the next few days.

So what does this have to do with using a content management system (CMS)?

Well, if your site has many pages, providing the search user with context about the page they’re considering clicking might actually help convince them to click on your listing. Or, they may see that they really want to click on the listing’s parent page or category.

Using a CMS can help you ensure that the websites you maintain and/or build are structured in a way that Google can easily decipher site organization. Tweak CMS, for example, uses a parent-child organizational structure to ensure that your site fully leverages the sitemaps protocol (very helpful for SEO) as well as providing an automated method for generating breadcrumb (crumbtrail) navigation. Google’s announcement indicates that breadcrumb navigation is a key factor in determining whether they can include this new feature on a given site’s listing.

If you’re wondering about future trends in computing, you need to be aware of Google’s Chrome OS. If you’ve ever heard of the concept of the Web as an operating system, this is basically Google’s attempt at delivering on that.

Chrome OS is currently intended for use on netbook-like devices, which are small and portable. Everything you do, when using Chrome OS, is through the browser (the same Chrome browser Google offers now). There are some resulting benefits from this approach, namely speed in doing anything online, but the tradeoff is simplicity. You can’t run Photoshop or Quickbooks or any other “installed” application on Chrome OS.

Here is one critical review of Chrome OS and one positive review.

And here is a blurb that explains one of the benefits of using a Web operating system like Chrome OS:

…the overhead of managing multiple PCs is too high for a home user. Paraphrased, his statement was that if you have five conventional PCs, it’s a pain to keep them all up-to-date and their data synced. The reason, I would add, is that five conventional PCs each presume that they’re either alone in the universe, or that they “connect” to this thing called a “server.” But five Chrome OS portables are five caches for the same cloud-based user and application data, and as such they resemble five netbooks only in their form factor.

And finally, a video:

I love this mobile marketing campaign from Editoras, an online bookstore in Brazil! QR codes spread around the city allowed users to take a snapshot with their camera phones and view random messages about love or hate from Twitter.

A hard-copy book featuring the same QR codes on each page, sold-out in a short time. Viewers can flip through the book, take photos of the QR codes, and view new messages about love or hate.

Brilliant.

Watch the video to learn more:

via Mobile Marketing Watch

Burger King and Microsoft have teamed up to promote Windows 7 in Japan with…a 7-patty burger. The statistics on this burger are pretty absurd: 2,120 calories, weighing in at 1.7 pounds.

Assuming Microsoft’s objective is publicity, not coronary disease, the stunt appears to be working. But, let’s be honest, this is still coming from Microsoft. What do you think? Would this be more successful coming from Apple or Google (not that they’d ever do this)?

View CNN’s coverage below:

Here’s an ad I can’t read: