Thread: I need your opinions...

Hello i am new but wanted your take on this.

Yesterday a good friend and myself fell out over their website and I would like your opinions because if I am wrong I will apologise. They had their website revamped a couple of months ago and although I wasn’t asked to do it I know this happens and he probably had his reasons so I never said anything about it. Over the last few days because of the job markets I have decided to go self employed and he was thrilled with the idea, out of interest I asked him what he paid for his website as I had done some research on average prices for bog standard websites (keep in mind i am from the UK and his from the US). I was expecting him to say between $500 – $1,000 but instead he paid up to $2,700, further to my surprise is that his site didn’t even validate.
This is his site: http://www.richardhorvitz.com/
I told him that i thought he paid a little to much for what he got and the augment escalated from there. He just said about the number of files that was embedded, but mp3s and videos are pretty standard. He just believes that's the standard rate in America to pay but i still think that's to much for what he got?

I spend some time on American forums and it does appear that folks in the US pay a little more for their websites. I have no idea why, maybe Brits just take a little more convincing about the benefits?

The validation errors on the pages I have looked at seem to come from the non self-closure of tags ( />), which is a must with xhtml to validate, but also some of it appears to have been classic cases of using a text editor, such as TinyMCE, to add content. This may well be the website owner adding their own content so possibly not the fault of the developer. The inline styles are also a symptom of this.

That's the thing with CMS, once you hand it over, you accept it is in the hands of a novice!

It is my personal belief that validation is a tool and not an end goal anyway.

So, yeah a bit expensive but not a rip-off.

You may see that he's paid over the odds but it's his money and his choice and if he got what he was expecting for the price then I don't really see a problem.

Ideally he could have asked your opinion on the price before accepting the quote but as Corrosive mentioned prices are higher in the US so he may have struggled to get a decent designer for the price you imagined.

It's a little like someone coming here expecting a logo for £50 because that's what it costs in India.

Thanks for your opinions guys. Yes i noticed they pay over the odds in America. Maybe more of us British should advertise in the states.

I could have done it for less (British rates) and i would have done it better (I am not a fan of the design but i haven’t told him that of course!). But i suppose thats the under lying root of the fight. The main thing is that his happy with it.

Design does seem a bit basic - big photo of him centrally aligned, strip of difficult to use thumbnails which on first load looks out of alignment, sentence in black and bold and then chunk of empty space underneath.