I received an email from a friend early today about a company that won a tender to build The Free State provincial government website for R140 million. It wasn’t long after receiving this email that the story flew through the social channels like wild fire, and rightfully so.
The company who won the tender was Cherry Online and the person who granted the tender was Elzake Rockman (Elzabe Rockman is the Director General of the Free State Provincial Government), who disputed the amount and said it was actually R40 million. Very little information has been made public about the whole situation or who exactly was involved and what the agreement was, but MyBroadBand did a good job at digging into the details. It’s worth reading that article if you’re not up to speed with this story.
Now, I’m not going to go on about how the price was too much, because anyone who’s ever had a website built or has been commissioned to build a website will know that R40 million is far too much, let alone R140 million. I’ve been involved in several projects that costed in at the R500,000 – R1,000,000 range, but believe you me, we were building highly intelligent bespoke systems, not WordPress installs. With all that being said, I have something that I wanted to share which has annoyed me about the whole situation and I feel like I need to get it off my chest, so that’s what I’m going to do.
In between all the opinions flying around, there was a common trend that I picked up on and that was people saying: It’s WordPress.. just buy a $40 theme, slap it on WordPress, make a few tweaks and you’re done. Now, I agree that the end product provided by Cherry Online certainly doesn’t warrant R40 million, not even 1 million, hell, not even R100,000 but I do get annoyed with every Tom, Dick and Harry claiming to be able to do it in a couple hours, yet when I spend hours reaching out to find people to put websites together, suddenly I’m quoted R20,000+ .. “but it should only take a few hours?”. I should state that the very people who made these comments are people who I have spoken to before and/or have worked with and/or have worked with someone I know.
I get my back up because I run a digital marketing agency where we build websites, small ones, medium sized ones and big ones, and we do a hell of a good job, but it doesn’t take just a few hours to assemble a website on WordPress for a client, not unless you’ve been doing it a long time and you have the easiest client in the world who isn’t too worried about their brand being represented online (haha). Another thing that’s important to note is that all these people are neglecting to build in the time it takes to take a brief, court a potential customer and set up a server. I want to put all of these things out there because before I know it, everyone who comes to me for a quote is going to expect a beautiful content management system for R5,000 and to be perfectly honest, it’s not feasible to build websites at that cost, not unless you’re a freelancer with very low overheads and clients who are incredibly easy. I think that web designers, web developers and all the people in this industry should be making an effort to share knowledge and educate people about the process of building a website. People should not be so quick to jump and say that it only takes a few hours, because at the end of the day, their sly and attempted clever comments are incorrect and made out of context.
Before I sign off, I want to mention a few things:
- The company completely ripped off the Freestate Government, regardless of anything that is said.
- Ripping people off is uncool, just remember, karma is a bitch.
- A successful website will not cost you only R5,000, or at least, 99% of the time it won’t.
- If this was a clever campaign by Cherry Online to draw lots of back links to the website, kudos ;)
- Ace Magashule, the Premier of the Free State Province in South Africa, is getting a lot of flack from the public on Twitter, take a look here.
So, there are my thoughts. Love them, hate them, you’re opinion is always welcome ;)
Update: Here is a detailed breakdown of the costs associated with the building of the website: http://www.gadget.co.za/pebble.asp?relid=6025
Thanks for this Chris – I build WordPress websites and charge about R3 000 – R6000 depending… And beleive me, I never make my money on websites – I just like building them. Sometimes you get tricky themes. But mostly it is the client who doesn’t understand – who wants to do it themself…, who gives you the wrong copy – why am I telling you this? You do it too so you know that it can take months. But when you get someone going on the web and they really get into it, it makes it all worthwhile :-)
@Karen – Absolutely spot on. I, by no means, am saying that a simple WordPress website should cost in the tens of thousands and I hope my article didn’t come across like that, I merely wanted to point out that all the people saying it’s just 2 hours of work because you download/upload are over exaggerating and I’m willing to host a WordPress Off at my offices to prove my point ;) But yes, if you have a client that is incredibly relaxed is happy to allow you to download WordPress, upload to hosting (assume the permissions work first time), purchase a $35 theme and upload, then it can be good, but we mustn’t forget that there’s content population, image resizing, logo manipulation and there should be training involved – it’s all the little things that add up and that’s not even taking a client that asks for 2-3 changes into account. With all that being said, doesn’t matter how difficult a project is, it won’t be worth R40 million, let alone R140 million ;-)
R140 million website – http://t.co/rBGSQAfOjf
I couldn’t agree more! Spot on!
Whats equally amusing/annoying is people dissing WordPress over all this. As if their solution or skill is somehow superior to a platform powering most of the websites on the internet at the moment (some high profile examples http://goo.gl/aL8NS).
@Ross – Good point and that’s a really excellent link, thank you for sharing.
@Pieter – Glad you’re on the same page mate :)
LOL!
Not at bad price for a $40 Themeforest (London Live) bought theme!
Defo a legendary rip-off!
I was going to offer to do some SEO for them, and maybe a bit of copy-checking too, considering some of the horrendous spelling and grammar mistakes they have on there.
100k/month. Too much? :p
@Ant – Nice to hear from you pal!
@shadowfox – Yeh, and we ran an SEO audit on Serperture.com and there’s a bundle of basic foundation SEO problems: http://www.serperture.com/freestateonline-seo-audit-05-03-2013.pdf
Im with Ross, and clearly you get it Chris.
Karen… i feel your pain :D
I’ve been in the web game for 9 years now. the last 6 of which were spent primarily designing for the wordpress platform. The flack w.r.t. the WP platform is totally unwarrented and comes from the ignorant and uninformed.
I think there is a clear distinction that needs to be made between what is available to a client when running a site on the wordpress platform – dictated by largely by budget. 1.quick/cheap and 2.customised. And as with any website, its a case of ‘how long is a peice of string’. Costs will rise based on what is required, both website functionality wise and amount of time required doing research and consulting clients.
So sure, you can buy a theme and slap something together in (realistically) 4 – 5 hours, but it will just be another wham-bam-thank-you-mam web presence with no strategy involved and no ongoing worth for the client. The other side of a coin is a ‘designed from the ground up’, thought through, strategically placed offering with custom designed and developed UX (user experience) elements.
We also run major corporates on the wordpress platform (most notably several foschini group sites, springbok atlas group websites, prominent wine labels and several vehicle dealerships) becasue of its customisability and the fact that the nitty gritty is taken care of, and your time and focus goes into custom dev and actually providing the client with a suitable solution.
It all boils down to project management 101 – the old ‘cost-time-quality’ triangle. You cant offer a bmw driving experience for the price of a toyota conquest or i the time it takes to built a street-kart.
So the point has been made about the time required to quickly put something together in wordpress BUT the statement in my opinion only serves as ammo for clients who do not understand what really goes into the creation of a successfull website.
And yes 140, 40 even 1mil is rediculous for a site that i’ve been trying to load for the past few days, with no success. The cherry online website (company credited on the freestate website) does not even exist.
Hi Chris,
Being from a non-web background, I’d like to know the following:
If you have an existing website that was built from the ground up without WordPress or a similar host, and you’d now like your site to be in WordPress due to the “ease” of changes, additions and plugins, would it cost the same as building a website from scratch? In my opinion you already have everything you need, you know exactly what it needs to look like and if there ever were an easy thing to do, in terms of web designing, this would be it. Having said this, the amount of time it takes to build the site would then obviously be less and hence making the whole exercise cheaper? Is this kind of reasoning justifiable or am I thinking this way due to the fact that I did not study web design? Great post by the way!