When looking to build a website for the first time, or looking to get your existing website rebuilt, you will find a competitive marketplace with lots of people vying for your business. So why should you choose Watch the Dot to work with on your next WordPress Project?
Here’s some reasons why we think you should work with us:
We are actual WordPress Experts
One of the reasons for the popularity of WordPress is it’s relative simplicity of use:
As the theory goes:
- Install WordPress
- Chuck on a theme
- Find a few plugins
- Send a massive bill to the client
Except it doesn’t really work like that
The majority of business we see offering WordPress services don’t really understand WordPress. We fix their sites All. The. Time. They fall into three types:
- Trainees – New to web development looking to get clients. They usually compete on price and are great if you have a smaller budget and are just getting started. We regularly train new developers too, and if they can stand the competitive market place and don’t end up getting a F/T job in 6 months they can be right for some situations – more power to them!
- Salesmen – Drives to your office in a brand new Audi. Has an expensive office and spends 4 hours doing a flash presentation. Charges a fortune for domain names and hosting (£200 / year for an 11.99 domain is not uncommon) and usually employ either £1/hour offshorers or the trainee above after his 6 months of freelancing. These are the worst sort. Your website will be expensive and knocked together. They use out of the box defaults for everything whether appropriate or not (think loads of flashy animation and spinning graphics on a funeral directors website). The after-support comes with endless bills. And more bills. And then they disappear because the business model doesn’t support the Audi and office once the disgruntled clients start moving away. Lot’s of our clients come to us this way.
- High End Agencies – Expensive but they generally know what they are doing. Often take on Government and Grant aided projects where the money flows freely. Then they book us to do the work. We do lots of white-label work for high end agencies! We’re not complaining, they keep us busy enough!
On the other hand, we actually know what we are doing:
- Our small technical team consists entirely of Computer Science Graduates.
- We have been building websites since the 1990s.
- We have been working with WordPress websites since the mid 2000s
- We code
- We have run our own businesses and know the businesses challenges too
- We contribute free plugins to the WordPress.org plugin repository
We are UK based and we don’t employ Offshorers
We’ve nothing against offshorers per se. Everyone needs to make a living.
But for some agencies, all the work is done by random developers, usually on the otherside of the World, usually for a few £s an hour, usually well below the minimum wage, usually with no technical oversight.
In the early days we hired a few ourselves.
Here’s me venting my frustration about it on Facebook almost a decade ago:
In my experience, the work is often of very poor quality – usually looks good at the front, held together with tape at the back. And support is non-existant. Once paid, they disappear.
Not all offshorers will be terrible and some people may have a positive experience. I never have. Caveat emptor. Make sure you know who is actually doing the work for you.
We’re not about to disappear
See section above on freelancers.
Developers come and go. The space is competitive and it can be hard to make a living, particularly in the early days. That’s why so many developers just disappear 6 months after building your website.
But this is what we do. We’ve been doing it well over a decade and we’re not going anywhere. If you come back to us in five years, we’ll still be here.
Twice in the last year we have lost projects on price, only for the client to come back to us when the developer has packed up and got a job. That’s the two we know of.
We are not the most expensive
We’re a small team and we do virtually no sales outreach: We have a website that ranks pretty well on Google; We do occasional Pay Per Click, usually when promoting a new service; Our client retention is excellent – we have lots of regular clients who have been with us for years. Client No1 is still with us on a monthly retainer.
This keeps our costs relatively low. We don’t have to support the sales team, or advertising campaigns, or the absent owner/director with 5 other businesses.
But our skills are highly technical so…
We are not the cheapest either
You will probably find some who tells you they can do the job for less than us. As the saying goes “If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur”.
We probably won’t be your cheapest quote, but we can guarentee our technical expertise will be as good as – probably better than – your highest quote.
And we’re friendly and easy to deal with
We are a small team so if you work to us, you’ll get to know us and us you. We will know who you are when you call and what your project is. We’re friendly and personable, and unlike many IT types, we’re people-people too!
If you’re serious about operating your business online, let’s have a free no-obligation chat to see how we get on. You can book directly into my diary below
