I've been talking with agencies that make websites using wordpress and they make the most basic website things seem like they're premium features like they highlight –
Mobile-Friendly Design
Contact Form Integration
Social Media Integration
Google Analytics Integration
https (I guess instead of http?)
You can tell me that I am working/talking with bad agencies, or they're scamming me or don't know what they're doing or talking about. But nope, a lot of these agencies seem good and I've talked with like 10 different agencies and they can't all be idiots. I've also talked with like 10 different solo designer/developers. And no these people aren't cheap from fiverr or upwork living in Pakistan.
Like these "features" are standard on mainstream, some people would call them beginner platforms, like squarespace, wix, etc. I can see those features being new and premium like 10 years ago, but not today. And that's just a few of them that they point out. There are other features that they say the websites will include that are so basic and common these days.
Why do many wordpress designers/developers people seem so ancient?
it’s a marketing strategy to get clients. most clients don’t know anything about web design/development. many of these features were a hit or miss about 10 years ago. now it’s all standard, but the clients don’t know that.
Because you’re the exception not the rule. Many businesses are actually profitable due to the ignorance of their customers.
It’s basically a game of upsell.
To your point, the average customer doesn’t know most of these things come bundled on most platforms that sell themes, such as ThemeForest, which I am by NO means endorsing.
I personally think this is a really toxic way of doing business. At my place we often get frustrated business owners asking for help when they’ve paid for a website that hasn’t been tailored to mobile because they didn’t realise it was an extra thing they needed because, like seamew said, they often don’t know anything about websites.
I suppose its good for business for us but it shafts the business owner completely because the often have to buy a rebuild or find another agency that has specific knowledge regarding the build
The same reason they sell more websites than you do. You should do this in your bids as well. Was that a rhetorical question?
you said it yourself you are looking at budget options
1st “other” platforms offer prebuilt templates/designs features etc, you are going to have to configure them manually (yourself)
2nd agencies/devs, will set up these services and configure them from the ground up for you
3rd they are going to customize “everything” (at least most of the basic things) for you, backend/frontend, instead of doing it yourself
4th real support
5
6
7
…
[is that what you call ancient?](https://fortune.com/2024/07/20/squarespaces-cmo-cold-called-yellow-page-firms-land-jobs/)
Worked at digital marketing agencies previously and it’s one part not updating their business model and two parts their average client (in dozens of verticals) doesn’t know any better and thinks it’s ground breaking tech.
LOL, you can actually find gigs on fiverr/people from Pakistan who actually offer these 😂
The WordPress Dev world is low-key toxic tbh, people are either very helpful or they want to charge you 500$ for a single line of code/plugin install.
Everyone pretty much covered it. Buzzwords. Some people still call Microsoft because a pop up window told them to. They’ll still get scammed. Most are riding on that lingo because a lot of that stuff is filler. IMO it’s “as seen on tv” style marketing and it is definitely seedy.
I took on a client recently who has had several “webmasters” in the past few years. So called WordPress developers who were really just installing plugins and bloating a “child theme” on a shitty host. The vps was so misconfigured. Two 30GB log files throwing simple to fix errors for YEARS. This all for a relatively simple blog website. And it costs people THOUSANDS of dollars to be ignorant of some of this stuff.
It’s hard to see competence in advertising things like responsive design. It’s like saying “hire us to build your house..foundation included!”
Plenty of people have no idea. They just want it to work well enough.
Most things of your list actually are premium features. You name it yourself: “integrations”. WordPress has no inbuilt contact form, social media or google analytics integrations. Those are all plugin based. And they have to be integrated to fit your site.
I’m a dev and a team lead for an agency that specializes in WordPress sites. You would be surprised just how little business owners know about websites. Most don’t know what https is. They just want their website to look nice and want it to work. They don’t understand that consideration needs to be made for the site to be mobile (and tablet) friendly. That work needs to be put in so that Google finds their site the way they want them to…etc. I had one client who didn’t understand most things about their own website and would start every meeting with: “Explain it to me like I’m 5 years old. Use crayons.”
So, ya. It’s not that we’re behind or ancient. We actually build some amazing websites. It’s more that there are a lot of businesses that just don’t know what they want or need and don’t understand that it’s not all automatically there from the get go.
It’s easy to you. But it’s not easy to a bakery shop owner who barely knows how to use Facebook.
In some parts of the world, this is the crap people ask for.
I’ve experienced this a lot. While I’m busy explaining how a website can bring them growth and marketing, they’re worried about whether, “the site will work on mobile”, “will it have secure in the browser”, “can I have a contact form”, “it must have Google Maps”, “I want a counter to see how many visitors”, “disable right click”.
🤦🏻♂️
One of the most repeated questions / concerns I get from clients is “Will it look good on my phone?”
Responsive webdesign is a big selling point to most people.
Social media integration is also another thing that is brought up and when clients learn I can put their IG feed right on their site, they get excited.
I run an agency, I tried to not include such basic things in proposal and was pricing better than competition yet my proposals would get rejected because apparently I wasn’t giving them these features, although I explained them that these are basic things that everybody would give but still they would get swooped by people talking sh!t in technical jargons and landing clients left right and center, so agencies do it because people want it.
I lost a large seo contract because on call I didn’t explain them I would do technical audit, do meta titles, descriptions and meta keywords, I’d fix h1, h2 and p tags. (These are most basic things that are to be sone by default, my friend who helped me get on that call told me that other agency explained all these and their manager was swooped in and handed them the contract)
So agencies that don’t use sh!tty jargons and stuff lose clients. So we have to do it!
You seem to think savvy businesses outsource webdesign. 99% of wordpress sites are requested and build for small starting businesses.
You might also ask why starting businesses think they can do their own administration. In Dutch wordpress fora, we get so much basic questions …..
Even here, if I answer WP_Query ….. most people zone out. Basic questions even by ‘webdesign’ companies. Incredible misinformed people on SEO.
PR. Nothing more.
Its like a FAQ section really. Most clients don’t know the current level in web dev so they will ask basic quesstions like “Can we integrate our social channels??” “Can we have a contct form?”
Its answering the basic questions before they’re asked
most bad business owners who know nothing about why their company should have a website employ bad one-man-band web designers who also know next to nothing. It has nothing to do with WordPress.
An old advertising guy once told me to “sell old ideas to new clients and new ideas to old clients”.
New clients get scared off when you start talking over their heads. Once you’ve earned their trust you can push them towards innovation.
Feels like you’re just looking for something to complain about. Most people are not sophisticated or as informed as you think with the products they want or need.
It’s called marketing mate.
These are the same agencies that bill 700 euros for a site, maximum 1000 for a full web shop.
What would you expect? All what they sell is a scam from start to finish, what features to include in that money??
Just think that for a custom project if you’re an e-commerce agency, only the graphic designer has allocated 20 to 30 billable hours (even more if there are more templates). So only the price of the designer would be on that invoice 1200 euros at least.
After that, there’s front end, allocated on the project, there’s back end and some agencies have testers and only after all is checked the project or changes are deployed to production.
A lot of WordPress agencies are comprised mostly of designers with rudimentary frontend skills. Many only know how to use page builders and very few can implement custom code without outsourcing or finding an off-the-shelf plug-in to do the task.
That said, it’s pointless, as others have said, pushing heavy dev-speak when selling these services. Very few clients know anything about a website.
It’s usually a struggle just explaining the difference between email, domain names and hosting to most of them.
From implementing Analytics with Google
Tag and proper consent tracking myself let me tell you – it’s not easy to do and doesn’t work out of the box if you want meaningful analytics for your website. This alone needs specialists most of the time.
The thing is also. Most businesses need nothing but a very basic website to funnel their products to their market. Depending on the type of product this then means different ways of integrations. Restaurants need reservation integration (sometimes), hotels a meaningful booking interface if they don’t want to share their profit with booking.com and everyone else a webshop integration of some sort. Yes theres plugins for all of that but it will need integration to tailor it to the specific business so they are successful with it. Also it’s very difficult to get the client to actually describe what they need.