Lebedev Studio - back in the past or how much does it cost to make a website?
“How much does it cost to create a website for Lebedev?”
"Good day. I am Artemy Lebedev. I am the main artist, founder and designer of the studio, which since yesterday is called Artemy Lebedev Design Studio, the former Web Design. From today it is renamed. The renaming process was to replace the two gifs.
The topic of my report - how much is the site? I hope that the first half of the report will be occupied with my thoughts, and the second with your questions and my answers, respectively. Actually, the cost of the site is the most uninteresting thing in the history of its creation, both for me and for the customer, because a serious customer worries little about the money spent on the site.
')
Where does the site start? What is the starting point of a website, in particular, for a web-studio, which I, perhaps not without false reasons, consider to be one of the most successful, and what is different about what I do from what exists around me, from the point of view of how I I appreciate? The site, which makes my studio, and in general all the activities of the studio is aimed at ensuring that in every step all our actions are professional. We try to do so that all our work, all our actions to communicate with the customer, all our public speaking, advertising, etc. were designed for the future. We do not have the task to earn a penny today while they are paying it, and tomorrow to do something else. If I pursued such a goal, I would deal with sites for $ 500. If I announced such a policy tomorrow, then in a week I would have 500 customers who would like to order a website for that amount. I would earn as much money as I could in my entire life. I do not pursue such a goal for reasons of professionalism of the product that we do. Who does not know, I will say that 10 people work in my studio - these are people who are directly involved in creating the site: development, support, communication with the customer, etc. And I develop the design and define the concept, policy and ideology.
What is the current situation in our domestic web design market? There is a certain number of studios. Of these, 70 percent can immediately not be considered studios, because they are private people: schoolchildren and students who came to the Internet wrote: “We are engaged in web design,” and immediately got into all the catalogs, Yellow Pages, magazines, etc. . Everyone immediately believes that they are truly designers. And they have nothing. They do not even have their own phone, which can be placed on the site, because they are sitting at home, they feel sorry for them and mom will scold if they call. Therefore, they give only E-mail. We do not consider these people. There are others, but it is also hard to work with them, to determine the picture of the professional market with regard to them, because they do not want to play in the professional market. It is associated with money too. For example, with these people, at a minimum, it is impossible to agree that they do not entice employees. The first thing that happens in any civilized industry is that the main players conclude such a non-detaining agreement, which is respected. This is completely normal and natural. As a maximum, you can not agree on a pricing policy with them. You cannot come to these people and say: “We can agree on this: do you consider yourself to be a serious studio? Fine. Let's decide6 that the sites that we build do not cost less than $ 10,000. “People can say:“ Great. We agree. “But tomorrow they will take the site for $ 2000. They are not ready to wait until a major customer comes up. They are ready to take whatever they give now, any orders. This applies to all studios that I know. There are customers whom I refused because they offered little and I know where they went then. At the same time, I definitely know that the budget has not increased by one cent during this time.
What does website creation consist of? First of all, even before that ... There is no such thing that a person will call you in the studio and ask how much the site costs, and we told him so much and he either agrees or disagrees. This is not happening. It’s like what an investor and film producer asks: “How much is five movies?” He says: “A million.” It is not possible to imagine such a situation, because there is a project proposal on paper. In this offer hangs a label with a price that is looking for its customer. This is what my studio is doing in this case. When we meet with our customer at the very first stage, we write him a paper - 20 pages of text, where we offer what we can do for him, i.e. write a concept. This concept overlaps all the thoughts of the customer that he had before he came to us. He came, he wanted: a site that says "about the company", their address and their E-mail, "clients" and "partners". Everything. We immediately throw away these things and offer him what is more suitable for him. We try to learn as much as possible about this company, to understand what it wants, to offer those solutions that are still original on the Internet. Such a paper is made. She already has some price. She is different every time. The minimum is $ 10,000. The average contract only for the design of the site, which is about 1/5 part of the work to create the site, costs about 30000-40000 $. This is the very-most initial price, which is taken for the site, which has a main page, some basic elements: content, concept, etc.
What happens next? What else there are things that affect the price in a big way? Programming. For each site that we make, if it is not a completely microscopic site, such as almaz.ru, where 6 pages of text and nothing else, and a normal one - mtelecom.ru or xerox.ru for example, are sites with 2500 pages of text, which they gave us, they write special programmers. In my studio there are two programmers who write special databases and special tools that provide very easy work in the future with this server. For example, if we have agreed with the customer that he will support himself, he has a webmaster, then everything is done to make this webmaster all the work easier as much as possible. He does not have to, for example, climb into the computer on New Year's Eve and change the date from 1998 to 1999 on all 2000 pages - he changes it in one place, it changes automatically on the entire server. The same with text fill, image fill, etc. - all systems are automated. There is a closed site called rfn.ru. On the first page, a simple person sees nothing - everything is for investors, for financiers, and only in English. But the journalists who write this information, every day write a huge number of articles for this server, they do not know HTML at all. They have a special editor on the site, which text copied from Word automatically puts on the site, tfm text is automatically placed in the directory, a link is automatically put on it, a title is automatically written in this document, this document can be immediately found through the site search system, etc. d. Those. about the same mechanisms that are used on all major Western sites, such as ZDNet, CNet, etc. Nobody is engaged in manual processing, this is the thing that should die off, dry out and fall off. It is suitable only for small private sites and will be alive while Vasya Pupkin is alive - always, but very few. Programming costs some money too. Usually this is $ 10,000-20000.
In fact, the site is ready, it has a text, etc. This is just the beginning, because no one yet knows about the site. You need to do something with it. If you simply put it on the Internet at your favorite address www.firma.ru , then most likely no one will come there, even if you print this address on business cards or hang it in your store. The people will never react to this; all these moves are so far ineffective. In our country, in programs that are devoted to the Internet, computers, etc., a person can talk as much as he can about his address - as a result, usually 10 people come after the transfer, which is completely ineffective. Therefore, big enough money is spent further, depending on the ambitions, desires and needs of the customer, on promotion, so that this resource from its first "I" is automatically positioned, as we say, by Internet residents, so that everyone at once knows that such a resource, he has such and such intentions, such and such plans, he suggests it, something can be done on this site, etc. These are separate things that, of course, are not included in the original cost of the site.
What is included in such promotion efforts? First of all, it is special in the "paper" press. This is not just an advertisement of 5x10 cm where www.firma.ru is written, because it works, but in very rare cases: the word price sounds good, and if I wrote something else, for example DDC, then it turns out for a person to not care DDC or CDC. He simply will not remember this address, he will never go there and he will not associate with anything good. There are special articles in large ceremonial editions. This all happens not at the same time, but gradually, in detail. There is a banner ad that I'll talk about tomorrow. This is one of the most powerful tools, but again it depends on how to use it. If you just take a banner, write www.firma.ru on it and hang it on the net, then the result will be none.
There are many special places in the network that are specifically designed to notify people about what new projects are: web browsers, network announcements systems, places with links, provider pages, which are actually very powerful advertising places that the provider doesn’t does not give, so get there is a great honor. They have a link “Network resources” and if they put you there, it means there will be a lot of traffic from there. Plus, there are some places for Internet links. For example, it was very funny for me to find that a huge number of people, about 300 people a day, walk on my website metro.ru, which sits on the Internet for itself, which is a lot for such a place, actually from the subway, because many people are Internet kiosks, for example, at Kurskaya station or somewhere else. What interface did I make to this system? There is just such a disguised Explorer, the Internet connection goes through the channels that are laid in the subway, and there are links to various resources. In particular, there is a link to metro.ru. People stand in the subway in transition, go through my website and study the tokens of the 30s. There are unconventional advertising space, which no one knows where the traffic comes from. This is another area where the customer wants to enter. He pays money for it, which is always stipulated in advance, because there are resources that I know that I can take on them, and there are resources that are so uninteresting that I cannot even do them, I can not say a single word, nor draw a single banner, even kill.
The result is that in order to make the site, to make it an initial promotion, i.e. all the information, programming and fame, for example, for the first month, it all flies to the customer at $ 60000-100000. In addition, there is support. Support is one of the main things on which there are design studios in general, because very few people manage to do design all the time. In my studio, there are more people ready to work than anyone else - from 2 to 4 works per month. All other studios do at least 2-4 times less. There are no such number of customers that could overwhelm all these studios and receive from them the appropriate amount of design. These studios have to live on something, because one server per month does not allow keeping the studio in any way. If there is one customer, the work lasts a month or two on the server. A month or two of work ten people can not cost less than $ 10,000. Therefore, it turns out that the customer is still writing a support contract for another two, two, two. Then he makes this studio his official Internet partner, who solves all problems: when necessary, she watches everything that happens to the customer. The customer entirely considers the Internet studio as his advertising agency, his representative. This is very important, because a year ago nobody seriously considered the Internet from this point of view. Everyone believed that it was possible to use it, that if there was any money, it would be beautiful to come to a design studio. Now this situation is changing. We already have very serious companies that have offline advertising agencies that advertise in newspapers, on television, on billboards, on the radio. And there are people who do all the same on the Internet. Advertising agencies, not one of the advertising agencies - take any - they have not heard anything about the Internet, they don’t even have an E-mail address. Therefore, the company does not order them, because you call them, you ask: “Will you do this on the Internet?”. And in fact, it turns out that they do not do anything and try to move away from this business. Large firms now have a tendency to attract Network design studios as their main Internet partners, which in fact will tell them what to do. Those. they only client pays money and expects that they know what they say. When a certain contract period passes, they look at the studio. If her results are good: the site has become a hundred times more visited, people order, the support service does not do anything, because people do not call there, but download everything from the Internet. Then extend the contract with you. If not, if you did a series of actions that killed this site, then no one with you will renew the contract. But at that moment, when you communicate with this company, she doesn’t say anything to you, she just believes your words, since she has already chosen you. She knows that you are doing this professionally, and she still doesn’t have a staff of people who could do the same, but it’s better - where a company that doesn’t specialize in the Internet come from will suddenly take a professional who will know better What is a specialized agency for design, promotion, marketing, etc.? Therefore, such a support contract costs a lot too.
The result was such a picture of the cost of the site in Russia. But it still lags behind the American prices two years ago, because two years ago in America a fairly large site cost from $ 40,000 to $ 500,000. Just less than $ 40,000 no one took, it was a shame. There are no such prices in Russia yet, because, on the one hand, we do not have firms with such a turnover. The contracting firm cannot afford to spend $ 30 million per year on advertising and content projects on the Internet, in Russia there are no such firms. Could be such a company Gazprom, but he has not yet decided on it. Prices are gradually approaching. I think that next year they will be twice as much. Then an even more interesting situation in the web design market will begin: such a thing as a redesign will happen - all studios will receive orders from all of their competitors, all orders will go in a circle. Every year people will do something new: the text will remain, and the design will be fresher. Clients will come to another studio, most likely, even if they are not offered better, and try everything from everyone.
What other interesting things will happen? I distract from prices and talk about what will happen in the near future. First, there will be a merger of some studios. There will be a creation of new studios on the basis of advertising agencies. Those. advertising agencies will thus go online: they have many customers there, they have designers there, skills, programmers of their own, but at the same time they are not present on the Internet. Now they will offer, as a rule, a complete solution, and not just paper advertising.
And there will be a merger of companies from different areas. As an example, Makhaon’s company and the E-program design studio, which has been engaged in design and has always been involved in it, have come in, and Machaon only sits on the Internet and is not visible at all in the professional design market. They came together and called the association “Virtual Services Bureau” and made some very good sites. This is a very good development path. This is also getting closer to autumn, when there will be more such formations.
And I very much hope that there will be studios that are civilizing, with which it will be possible to agree that the site cannot cost less than this. And they will abide by these agreements, because in a normal civilized society they beat the chandelier on the head and expel them for violating such agreements. The man in the market no longer exists. I expect that this should happen, that such people will appear who will agree to abide by the conditions. And the prices on the site will grow. ”
Artemy Lebedev 1998
I apologize in advance if this article has already been published 100 times, but it was very interesting to me!
"Good day. I am Artemy Lebedev. I am the main artist, founder and designer of the studio, which since yesterday is called Artemy Lebedev Design Studio, the former Web Design. From today it is renamed. The renaming process was to replace the two gifs.
The topic of my report - how much is the site? I hope that the first half of the report will be occupied with my thoughts, and the second with your questions and my answers, respectively. Actually, the cost of the site is the most uninteresting thing in the history of its creation, both for me and for the customer, because a serious customer worries little about the money spent on the site.
')
Where does the site start? What is the starting point of a website, in particular, for a web-studio, which I, perhaps not without false reasons, consider to be one of the most successful, and what is different about what I do from what exists around me, from the point of view of how I I appreciate? The site, which makes my studio, and in general all the activities of the studio is aimed at ensuring that in every step all our actions are professional. We try to do so that all our work, all our actions to communicate with the customer, all our public speaking, advertising, etc. were designed for the future. We do not have the task to earn a penny today while they are paying it, and tomorrow to do something else. If I pursued such a goal, I would deal with sites for $ 500. If I announced such a policy tomorrow, then in a week I would have 500 customers who would like to order a website for that amount. I would earn as much money as I could in my entire life. I do not pursue such a goal for reasons of professionalism of the product that we do. Who does not know, I will say that 10 people work in my studio - these are people who are directly involved in creating the site: development, support, communication with the customer, etc. And I develop the design and define the concept, policy and ideology.
What is the current situation in our domestic web design market? There is a certain number of studios. Of these, 70 percent can immediately not be considered studios, because they are private people: schoolchildren and students who came to the Internet wrote: “We are engaged in web design,” and immediately got into all the catalogs, Yellow Pages, magazines, etc. . Everyone immediately believes that they are truly designers. And they have nothing. They do not even have their own phone, which can be placed on the site, because they are sitting at home, they feel sorry for them and mom will scold if they call. Therefore, they give only E-mail. We do not consider these people. There are others, but it is also hard to work with them, to determine the picture of the professional market with regard to them, because they do not want to play in the professional market. It is associated with money too. For example, with these people, at a minimum, it is impossible to agree that they do not entice employees. The first thing that happens in any civilized industry is that the main players conclude such a non-detaining agreement, which is respected. This is completely normal and natural. As a maximum, you can not agree on a pricing policy with them. You cannot come to these people and say: “We can agree on this: do you consider yourself to be a serious studio? Fine. Let's decide6 that the sites that we build do not cost less than $ 10,000. “People can say:“ Great. We agree. “But tomorrow they will take the site for $ 2000. They are not ready to wait until a major customer comes up. They are ready to take whatever they give now, any orders. This applies to all studios that I know. There are customers whom I refused because they offered little and I know where they went then. At the same time, I definitely know that the budget has not increased by one cent during this time.
What does website creation consist of? First of all, even before that ... There is no such thing that a person will call you in the studio and ask how much the site costs, and we told him so much and he either agrees or disagrees. This is not happening. It’s like what an investor and film producer asks: “How much is five movies?” He says: “A million.” It is not possible to imagine such a situation, because there is a project proposal on paper. In this offer hangs a label with a price that is looking for its customer. This is what my studio is doing in this case. When we meet with our customer at the very first stage, we write him a paper - 20 pages of text, where we offer what we can do for him, i.e. write a concept. This concept overlaps all the thoughts of the customer that he had before he came to us. He came, he wanted: a site that says "about the company", their address and their E-mail, "clients" and "partners". Everything. We immediately throw away these things and offer him what is more suitable for him. We try to learn as much as possible about this company, to understand what it wants, to offer those solutions that are still original on the Internet. Such a paper is made. She already has some price. She is different every time. The minimum is $ 10,000. The average contract only for the design of the site, which is about 1/5 part of the work to create the site, costs about 30000-40000 $. This is the very-most initial price, which is taken for the site, which has a main page, some basic elements: content, concept, etc.
What happens next? What else there are things that affect the price in a big way? Programming. For each site that we make, if it is not a completely microscopic site, such as almaz.ru, where 6 pages of text and nothing else, and a normal one - mtelecom.ru or xerox.ru for example, are sites with 2500 pages of text, which they gave us, they write special programmers. In my studio there are two programmers who write special databases and special tools that provide very easy work in the future with this server. For example, if we have agreed with the customer that he will support himself, he has a webmaster, then everything is done to make this webmaster all the work easier as much as possible. He does not have to, for example, climb into the computer on New Year's Eve and change the date from 1998 to 1999 on all 2000 pages - he changes it in one place, it changes automatically on the entire server. The same with text fill, image fill, etc. - all systems are automated. There is a closed site called rfn.ru. On the first page, a simple person sees nothing - everything is for investors, for financiers, and only in English. But the journalists who write this information, every day write a huge number of articles for this server, they do not know HTML at all. They have a special editor on the site, which text copied from Word automatically puts on the site, tfm text is automatically placed in the directory, a link is automatically put on it, a title is automatically written in this document, this document can be immediately found through the site search system, etc. d. Those. about the same mechanisms that are used on all major Western sites, such as ZDNet, CNet, etc. Nobody is engaged in manual processing, this is the thing that should die off, dry out and fall off. It is suitable only for small private sites and will be alive while Vasya Pupkin is alive - always, but very few. Programming costs some money too. Usually this is $ 10,000-20000.
In fact, the site is ready, it has a text, etc. This is just the beginning, because no one yet knows about the site. You need to do something with it. If you simply put it on the Internet at your favorite address www.firma.ru , then most likely no one will come there, even if you print this address on business cards or hang it in your store. The people will never react to this; all these moves are so far ineffective. In our country, in programs that are devoted to the Internet, computers, etc., a person can talk as much as he can about his address - as a result, usually 10 people come after the transfer, which is completely ineffective. Therefore, big enough money is spent further, depending on the ambitions, desires and needs of the customer, on promotion, so that this resource from its first "I" is automatically positioned, as we say, by Internet residents, so that everyone at once knows that such a resource, he has such and such intentions, such and such plans, he suggests it, something can be done on this site, etc. These are separate things that, of course, are not included in the original cost of the site.
What is included in such promotion efforts? First of all, it is special in the "paper" press. This is not just an advertisement of 5x10 cm where www.firma.ru is written, because it works, but in very rare cases: the word price sounds good, and if I wrote something else, for example DDC, then it turns out for a person to not care DDC or CDC. He simply will not remember this address, he will never go there and he will not associate with anything good. There are special articles in large ceremonial editions. This all happens not at the same time, but gradually, in detail. There is a banner ad that I'll talk about tomorrow. This is one of the most powerful tools, but again it depends on how to use it. If you just take a banner, write www.firma.ru on it and hang it on the net, then the result will be none.
There are many special places in the network that are specifically designed to notify people about what new projects are: web browsers, network announcements systems, places with links, provider pages, which are actually very powerful advertising places that the provider doesn’t does not give, so get there is a great honor. They have a link “Network resources” and if they put you there, it means there will be a lot of traffic from there. Plus, there are some places for Internet links. For example, it was very funny for me to find that a huge number of people, about 300 people a day, walk on my website metro.ru, which sits on the Internet for itself, which is a lot for such a place, actually from the subway, because many people are Internet kiosks, for example, at Kurskaya station or somewhere else. What interface did I make to this system? There is just such a disguised Explorer, the Internet connection goes through the channels that are laid in the subway, and there are links to various resources. In particular, there is a link to metro.ru. People stand in the subway in transition, go through my website and study the tokens of the 30s. There are unconventional advertising space, which no one knows where the traffic comes from. This is another area where the customer wants to enter. He pays money for it, which is always stipulated in advance, because there are resources that I know that I can take on them, and there are resources that are so uninteresting that I cannot even do them, I can not say a single word, nor draw a single banner, even kill.
The result is that in order to make the site, to make it an initial promotion, i.e. all the information, programming and fame, for example, for the first month, it all flies to the customer at $ 60000-100000. In addition, there is support. Support is one of the main things on which there are design studios in general, because very few people manage to do design all the time. In my studio, there are more people ready to work than anyone else - from 2 to 4 works per month. All other studios do at least 2-4 times less. There are no such number of customers that could overwhelm all these studios and receive from them the appropriate amount of design. These studios have to live on something, because one server per month does not allow keeping the studio in any way. If there is one customer, the work lasts a month or two on the server. A month or two of work ten people can not cost less than $ 10,000. Therefore, it turns out that the customer is still writing a support contract for another two, two, two. Then he makes this studio his official Internet partner, who solves all problems: when necessary, she watches everything that happens to the customer. The customer entirely considers the Internet studio as his advertising agency, his representative. This is very important, because a year ago nobody seriously considered the Internet from this point of view. Everyone believed that it was possible to use it, that if there was any money, it would be beautiful to come to a design studio. Now this situation is changing. We already have very serious companies that have offline advertising agencies that advertise in newspapers, on television, on billboards, on the radio. And there are people who do all the same on the Internet. Advertising agencies, not one of the advertising agencies - take any - they have not heard anything about the Internet, they don’t even have an E-mail address. Therefore, the company does not order them, because you call them, you ask: “Will you do this on the Internet?”. And in fact, it turns out that they do not do anything and try to move away from this business. Large firms now have a tendency to attract Network design studios as their main Internet partners, which in fact will tell them what to do. Those. they only client pays money and expects that they know what they say. When a certain contract period passes, they look at the studio. If her results are good: the site has become a hundred times more visited, people order, the support service does not do anything, because people do not call there, but download everything from the Internet. Then extend the contract with you. If not, if you did a series of actions that killed this site, then no one with you will renew the contract. But at that moment, when you communicate with this company, she doesn’t say anything to you, she just believes your words, since she has already chosen you. She knows that you are doing this professionally, and she still doesn’t have a staff of people who could do the same, but it’s better - where a company that doesn’t specialize in the Internet come from will suddenly take a professional who will know better What is a specialized agency for design, promotion, marketing, etc.? Therefore, such a support contract costs a lot too.
The result was such a picture of the cost of the site in Russia. But it still lags behind the American prices two years ago, because two years ago in America a fairly large site cost from $ 40,000 to $ 500,000. Just less than $ 40,000 no one took, it was a shame. There are no such prices in Russia yet, because, on the one hand, we do not have firms with such a turnover. The contracting firm cannot afford to spend $ 30 million per year on advertising and content projects on the Internet, in Russia there are no such firms. Could be such a company Gazprom, but he has not yet decided on it. Prices are gradually approaching. I think that next year they will be twice as much. Then an even more interesting situation in the web design market will begin: such a thing as a redesign will happen - all studios will receive orders from all of their competitors, all orders will go in a circle. Every year people will do something new: the text will remain, and the design will be fresher. Clients will come to another studio, most likely, even if they are not offered better, and try everything from everyone.
What other interesting things will happen? I distract from prices and talk about what will happen in the near future. First, there will be a merger of some studios. There will be a creation of new studios on the basis of advertising agencies. Those. advertising agencies will thus go online: they have many customers there, they have designers there, skills, programmers of their own, but at the same time they are not present on the Internet. Now they will offer, as a rule, a complete solution, and not just paper advertising.
And there will be a merger of companies from different areas. As an example, Makhaon’s company and the E-program design studio, which has been engaged in design and has always been involved in it, have come in, and Machaon only sits on the Internet and is not visible at all in the professional design market. They came together and called the association “Virtual Services Bureau” and made some very good sites. This is a very good development path. This is also getting closer to autumn, when there will be more such formations.
And I very much hope that there will be studios that are civilizing, with which it will be possible to agree that the site cannot cost less than this. And they will abide by these agreements, because in a normal civilized society they beat the chandelier on the head and expel them for violating such agreements. The man in the market no longer exists. I expect that this should happen, that such people will appear who will agree to abide by the conditions. And the prices on the site will grow. ”
Artemy Lebedev 1998
I apologize in advance if this article has already been published 100 times, but it was very interesting to me!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/17538/
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