This is great and all, but you totally missed addressing the elephant in the room. The client’s budget vs the client’s expectations. In every project I’ve ever worked on for a small business the client had these huge ideas for their site but when it came down to it, I gave them a realistic price for their huge ideas, the simply did not have the budget for it.

This is when the client starts to race to the bottom to try and get the most work out of the least amount of money they need to spend. This is the reason why a lot of small businesses are unhappy with their sites. They got what they paid for. Good web development costs money, and if a small business can’t or won’t pay for it, then they won’t be happy with the results.

And the sad truth is that they usually end up spending what it would cost for a good site eventually anyway, but instead of paying one good developer, they ended up spending it on multiple bad developers and/or implementers, and still don’t get good results.

The impression I get from small business owners is that a website is just a thing they need because everyone else has one. Well, it isn’t just a thing you need. It’s a major representation of your business and sometimes for potential customers, the only representation of your business.

You’d be surprised at how many small business owners don’t have web development as part of their budget and don’t even include web development as part of their overall business plan when trying to build capital with things like business loans.

The WordPress community, in particular, has created this false impression of how you can have a great website for very little money with free plugins and free or low-cost prebuilt themes. This has created an idea in the business market that paying high prices for web development is not worth the investment. Small business owners have been told that they can get websites on the cheap and when they do their websites are crap, then they are unhappy.

These code of honor suggestions are nothing new for a web developer that actually takes their job seriously. The problem is all of those codes of honor translate into time, and that will cost the client money. The best way to cut costs is to not implement those codes of honor. This is where the implementers come in. They hit just the right price point where they charge enough to look like they know what they are doing but are so costly they drive away clients.