What Next – Web Costs Skyrocket
Do you remember the days when your website cost a few hundred quid and some spotty so-and-so made it over a few nights working in their bedroom? Just why have web costs skyrocketed?
I know I’m old fashioned – you only need to read a few of my Blog Posts about BitCoin or Brexit to get the idea, but I strongly suggest I work to an old fashioned rule that I earn depending on what I do – rather than just doing work for the highest bidder. This is a concept I have struggled to put into perspective.
Pre the Black Death pandemic of the 1450s, merchants were not allowed to earn a profit. They were expected to earn about the same as a labourer or anyone else. It was simply the case that you earned a daily rate that allowed you to survive in the position of society you were in. Naturally, that’s not fair and there are plenty of examples outside this remit. But the essential idea was that you earned a wage… you did not go into business to make money. If you look at this from the other end, i.e. rich downwards, then Lords did not break their tenants with overzealous rent collection, in fact, they usually took a proportion of your produce rather than money. And, sure, history is littered with examples of abuse, but the basic concept was there if your lord and master treated you right – the system worked.
Bring us forward to the current day and things have changed. Profit is everything and it’s just a question of how you can get away with it. If you bill one client £100 and another £1000 – whose to say and it’s more likely you’re going to concentrate on the highest payers. The game plan is shorter too nowadays, we want instant profit and playing a longer game is far less effective in the world of business. But is this why your web costs are skyrocketing?
The Bigger Picture
I’d put it to you that Tech is in trouble. It used to be said there was a shortage of web developers, programmers, and computer-savvy people. This remains true, finding someone that knows what they are doing is not easy and finding someone that thinks the way you think or does what you need them to is even harder.
But Tech is also growing at an incredible rate, from hardware, actual computers in datacentres using up all that green electricity – right through to software, programs and websites allowing you to conduct business one way or another. One client showed me how his software has gone online recently and instead of just clicking the program to open it, he had to log into a website, click a link, wait a bit and then watch all his data load into a very similar looking program, except this time it’s in the cloud instead of on his computer.
Some people call this bloat or bloatware – what was a simple job is now three jobs. Another example I can take is the newest version of Google Analytics… the idea that you can look up how many people visited your website is going or even gone. Instead, you can see how many engagements you had – except no one is quite sure what an engagement is exactly. The raw data we seek is hidden from us in a flurry of suggestive charts and graphs that indicate we need to do x, y and z jobs.
Web Costs
How does this translate into Web Costs – when quite simply, time. Time is the great resource that we’re all fighting over, I’ve always maintained the maxim that time is more valuable than gold, if I have to log into three fingerprint recognisers and some SMS messages to log into my bank account – that’s going to take time.
Web developers and programmers are actually notoriously bad at all this… Here’s the deal – think of an idea, a big bomb, hand it over to the scientists and tell them to make it, they don’t think of the consequences or impact, their job in their eyes is to make the biggest and best bomb. Sorting out the mess afterwards – that’s someone else’s problem. Web developers, because they are in short supply, also do this… Think of an idea, Facebook, right how complicated can we make it.
This extends into every facet of our IT world at the moment, we talk of AI and driverless cars, but we’re not asking the right questions, will this make the world better, will this give us more time. My children cannot believe that inserting a tape allows me to play music instantly in a car, instead of having to connect to Bluetooth and create some playlists as per today’s world. Has no one considered that the reason Radio 4 is such a major Radio station is that you can just switch it on?
Web costs are skyrocketing because everything a web developer touches now takes longer. Writing a website used to be about starting with some simple HTML code in a text editor, now you need to install half a dozen Apps, Repos and Dockers or if you’re wanting to do things quickly you sign up to Shopify or SquareSpace, where very quickly you’ll need to upload copies of your passport to prove you’re not a criminal.
Fundamentals
Just to stretch my point one bit further, code is binary, it can be either off or on, or perhaps it can be viewed at a series on 1’s and 0’s. That at the root of everything is what Tech is. That means everything that happens in Tech is a decision, a binary decision. And this is how it all works… Are you signing up – right First Name, Last Name, Email… do you need a password – right use upper and lower case, a number and a symbol… financial details – here we go again.
You can see this binary decision making beautifully on the current COVID Tests Ordering system on the NHS website – the questions you have to go through are very similar to an if/else statement and what that means is that there is nothing outside these decisions – there are no grey areas, there no room for manoeuvre, yes, that is my address, but I won’t be there on Tuesday can you deliver on Wednesday.
As a result, a web developer has to consider every eventuality. Again you can see this happening in something like AI or Robotics, our designers know they want a robotic hoover to work, but they cannot consider all eventualities, every home is different on dozens of different levels from pets to skyscrapers. Designing any electric car is a pain if you live on the 23rd floor of a block of flats.
And so the work goes on… the time is invested in solving all these issues, and our clients worry about dozens of different aspects of their website from SEO to whether web forms work, from the colour of their logo to the tense used in explaining what they offer and everyone is different.
Could it be simpler?
That is an interesting question. Simplicity comes from restriction. If there was only one way to build an eCommerce website would it be simpler?
However, I actually think it could be a lot simpler if only we as humans would be more accommodating and if the ‘profit’ motive of our current world was a lot less prevalent. How and why? Because if we shared our knowledge more – we’d have far less work to do.
Tech is complicated – a web developer writes some code only he knows what he’s written. There is actually no mechanism today to allow anyone to see how he made something work. Compare that to a car built 50 years ago, or a cart built 300 years ago. Never before in human history has so much knowledge been hidden from so many people. We don’t farm, people don’t understand where their food comes from, or how cotton is made or carpentry. the argument runs – they don’t need to, they can concentrate on what they do know, but I would put it to you that we don’t need all this complication, that takes up all our time. I don’t need to have multiple methods of seeing my bank balance. I don’t need a car that drives 1000 miles on one charge, I don’t need all the plastic a supermarket gives me.
Tim Burners-Lee the founder of the web summed it up nicely, the concept of the web was that people would hyperlink their knowledge to connect to other peoples knowledge. i.e. you shared your knowledge. Instead, we’ve built a web that demands we spend all our time on a small selection of websites, preferably ones that are super secure and offer the least amount of real value to us at all.
Web costs are skyrocketing, more so due to the pandemic, but the main reason for it is that we’re building the binary decision-maker into everything we do, it means a vastly more complicated world and one with ultimately less choice for a lot more money.
For a hassle-free quote please contact us and we can advise how to make things better for your customers rather than more complicated.