Three Way Teeter-Totter

We really want it all these days, don't we? We want a nice house, but we don't want to pay too much. We want fast food, but we don't want it to make us fat. We want 1,000 rolls of paper towel for $6.99. The marketing schemes of today tell us we can have anything we want, quickly and painlessly. But as we all know: Advertising lies. (we do all know that, right?)

The reality is, if you want a big house with a swimming pool and quiet neighbors, you're going to pay the fare. If you eat fast food, you're relying on microwaved, deep-fried items for your sustenance. And, if you want 1,000 rolls of paper towel...well...you gotta stand in a line for 3 hours at Costco.

When you boil down all of our wants and needs, they usually can come down to just three items: Quality, Cost, and Time We want high quality, at low cost, and we want it yesterday. The problem is, this isn't reality.

A bedrock principal of project development goes a little like this: Quality, Cost, and Time....Pick 2. The idea is, these three principals are tightly intertwined and if you alter one, the other two are altered as well. If quality is to go up, cost and time will increase. Is quick turnaround most important? That means that cost may go down, but so will the quality of the product. It's a three way teeter-totter that has to be balanced very carefully.

Balance In Web Design

Quality, Time and Cost are the three most important things to my web design clients. Some people want their site quickly. Some want it cheaply. Others want the quality to be high. However, most often, everyone wants all three (can you blame them?). Lots of web design companies will pretend you can have it all. To be honest, at Mustardseed, we're tired of that game.

You see, the reality is, you can't have them all. If a quality site is important, it's going to take more time and it's going to be more expensive. To lead people into thinking that's not the case just causes more problems down the line and frustrates the client at a later date when they see the reality. If budget is a primary concern, quality will inevitably go down because development time must decrease as well.

So, what do we do about all of this? I've started holding discussions with my clients regarding this reality. We've talked about priorities in their site. I have them evaluate which of these three is most important to them. And then we start the balancing act. Your web developer should have the same priorities that you do. They should work with you to find the proper balance of these three aspects on your site design. And they should do their best to make them come out as even as possible.

At Mustardseed, we are constantly striving to narrow the gap on Time, Quality, and Budget. We want to give you high quality for a low price...and launch your new site yesterday. But, alas, we're not Costco and we don't sell paper towel...We build custom websites from your specifications and always seek to help ministries get the most bang for their small-budget buck.