Nobody in Montreal Quotes You for the Writing

An email from a Montreal owner landed on a Sunday night, which is when the hard ones always land.

“Patrick, I’ve got three quotes in front of me and the cheapest is less than half the next one up. He can start Monday. Everybody keeps telling me you get what you pay for, and not one of them can tell me what I’d actually be missing. Can you?”

I sent him four lines back, and they weren’t the right four, so this is the long version and he’s the person I’m writing it to.

Take the cheap quote. I’m not here to talk you out of it.

But I’d like you to understand what’s in the box before Monday morning, because the part that’s missing is not the part your friends keep warning you about.

What that quote gets right

More than you’d think.

Whoever builds your website fastest will still hand you something tidy that fits a phone, comes up quickly and never warns a customer that it isn’t safe, because those particular jobs belong to the software rather than to the person you’re paying for them.

Every page carries a name of its own written into the code, called the title tag, and it does the work of the little brass plate beside an office door. 99.1% of the pages I opened in this city have one written, and 66.0% of the sites link out to a social profile as well.

Nobody sat down on a wet Tuesday and typed those in. The first one arrived with the page, and the second took one person a single afternoon, years ago, and has asked for nothing from anybody since.

How much of the website you’re about to buy do you imagine will be decided by a person, and how much of it simply arrives already decided?

Your quote covers the parts of a website that can be installed, and installing is real work that I’m not about to sneer at.

It’s the other thing I’d fight for, and it isn’t written on any of your three quotes.

The check with no button on it

Writing.

21.9% of the small business websites I audited in this city publish anything at all, last of the twenty four cities I checked, against 37% across everything I audited.

I went back over that number three times, and each time I assumed I’d made a mistake somewhere along the way.

I hadn’t. Montreal is comfortably fine at the jobs a machine handles by itself, and worst of anywhere I looked at the single job no machine has ever done for anybody.

Nearly every business around here has a website of some kind, 84.0% of the ones I sampled list one, a shade better than the 83% I counted nationally.

So the websites exist. Almost none of them carries anything worth opening a second time.

Why it never makes the quote

A website is something you buy once, while writing is something you keep doing, and nobody can put a job with no end date on a page with a total at the bottom of it.

So it falls off the quote. Every quote, mine included, unless the customer brings it up first.

Then it falls off the calendar as well, because the site went live, everybody said nice things about it, and the news page has sat there ever since with one lonely post dated the week you launched.

You’ve seen that page. You might be running that page.

When did you last open your own?

“Nobody reads a blog in my line of work”

I hear that most weeks, and the owner saying it is usually right about their own reading habits.

A mover emailed me last year to have his blog taken down after forty posts and no work off any of them. He was deleting the wrong thing.

Nobody sits down to read your blog. Of course they don’t.

They want one answer, they type the question into a phone at ten o’clock at night, and one of two things happens next. Either your page comes up with the answer sitting on it, or a competitor’s page does.

What do customers ask you on the phone before they’ll commit to anything? Every owner I’ve worked with has four or five of them and can list the lot without stopping to think about it.

Those aren’t blog posts. They’re the questions you already answer for free, ten times a week, out loud, to one person at a time.

Law firms are the worst offenders I’ve found. More than half of them publish something, and the answer they hand out on the phone all day still never makes it onto the site.

Writing one of them down is the entire job.

Could you name the question you’re asked most often, right now, without checking anything?

Write that one down first, then steer around the mistakes I made in my own first year of posting. They’re all still up there, spelling errors and all.

What it buys that money can’t

A competitor can copy your design over a weekend, buy the same template, hire the same photographer and match your prices by Friday afternoon.

He can’t copy four years of you answering the question nobody else in town could be bothered to answer.

Two businesses in this city, four streets apart, doing identical work, and only one of those phones rings. That’s usually where the difference sits.

Nothing else on your website has a lock on it like that. The post you write in March is still quietly working for you in November, while the advertising you buy in March is finished on the thirty first.

Would you rather own that, or rent it?

One question before you sign

Ask all three of them the same thing. Who writes the first six pieces, and when exactly is the first one due?

You’ll get three different faces out of that question.

One will tell you it isn’t included in the price. One will offer to bolt it on for a monthly fee and then quietly hand the work to a robot. The third will ask you what your customers keep asking you, and he’s the one I’d hire, even if he’s the dearest of the three.

I lose these quotes all the time, so I understand the shape of them fairly well. I build websites for businesses around Montreal and I’ve been beaten by the lowest number on the table more often than I’ve won against it.

My own price sits on a single page and I’m not going to sell it to you in the middle of a letter about someone else’s quote.

If you want a second opinion before Monday, send me the address of whichever site he’s showing you as his best work and I’ll go through the whole thing. Free, and I’ll tell you honestly if it’s good, because sometimes it is.

Who this letter wasn’t for

Not the shop that already publishes. You know exactly what it’s done for your phone over the past few years and you don’t need a letter from me about it.

Not the business whose work arrives by word of mouth alone, from a number painted on the side of a van, in a trade where no customer has ever searched for anything. If that’s honestly you, take the cheapest quote on the table and put the difference into the truck.

And not the owner buying a website because the bank asked to see one. Yours can stay as empty as you like and it’ll still do the job you need it to do.

It was written for the man with three quotes on a kitchen table on a Sunday night, who has already decided, and only wants to know what the decision costs him.

It costs you the one thing he was never able to sell you. So hire him anyway, and then go and write the first one yourself.