Yesterday, I was contacted by a company that was having troubles with their web people. Per the company's request, I was included in the conversation. Over the course of the conversation, I discovered that the web people charged the company $25K to build a 6-page web site, 6 years ago, in a WYSWYG cookie-cutter template. The site has never worked, and even the web people don't know how to add content. The web people charged the company an exhorbitant monthly "retainer" maintenance fee for up to x hours of work, at their full published hourly rate. In 6 YEARS, no security, module, theme, or software updates have been done.
I've dealt with these web people before, and cleaned up their mess. The meeting started off with this PRINTING company (the web people) having their senior web programmer and president state that we had no experience, and didn't know anything about web work. Whenever I would bring up the fact that their servers were down again, or that they hadn't cleaned up the old web site files, or that they hadn't done updates, they would act as if web people are upstream in the IT chain. Finally, I demanded that the web people log onto the site, and they didn't even know how.
I am expensive, mostly because it cuts down on places that just want to waste our time, but we do have a lot of charity clients. Our hourly rate is 10 times what these web people charge, and they are almost double the typical webmaster rate.
The final straw was today, when the web people sent over a "discounted" quote to rebuild the site over a 6-month period. The "complete rebuild" included a hefty fee for the conversion process to the company's current WSYWYG software, PLUS a hefty fee to clean up the old site that geeps popping up, PLUS a hefty monthly fee to transfer the look of the current site. If the company wants a new look, it's an ADDITIONAL $30,000 for their graphic designer to create a new look! This site is a home page describing services, an about us page, a testimonial page, a staff page, a page with PDF forms, and a search page that uses google's search engine.
The web company claims that the current site isn't viable because of its age and the custom programming the web people did.
I was completely agast that anyone would have the gall to blatantly rob someone in this fashion.
To have some fun, I rebuilt the site in notepad during the meeting. Web site work isn't usually something we do, but I felt so badly for them that I wanted to show them that not all IT people are dishonest. I recommended a company that does quality, honest web work for the usual webmaster rate.
I'm still pissed. Those web people give a bad name to my entire profession,
