Manufacturers, the Cheap Quote Gets One Thing Right

The cheapest quote in your inbox will build you a website that gets the important part right.

One part, anyway. The part nobody had to think about, and I’d rather own up to that in the second line than have you catch me at it in the fourth.

I’ve read a lot of the quotes manufacturers get sent. Three pages, a payment schedule, a list of inclusions that reads like a takeout menu, and a number at the bottom that’s half of what everyone else asked for.

I’m not going to tell you it’s a swindle, because it usually isn’t, and the people writing them are ordinarily competent at the specific work they’ve listed. It gets done, on time, by someone who has done it fifty times before.

You should still know which half of a website that number covers.

The check your trade wins

I audit forty seven trades and run every one of them through the same ten checks.

Standing them next to each other on the title tag one evening is how I found out manufacturers come to rest at 18 of 47 there, higher than they sit on any other check I run.

99.3% of the manufacturing sites I audited have one written.

Your trade is better at that one line than at anything else it does online. Feels alright, doesn’t it? Hold that thought for about ninety seconds.

Manufacturing is a strange trade to audit, because the businesses are careful about everything expensive and casual about everything cheap. A shop that documents a heat treat process down to the minute will happily let its website run unattended for four years.

What that line is doing

Take that line off a page and search engines start guessing what the thing is about, and I’ve watched a listing come back reading like a file name off someone’s desktop.

Not the company. Not the work. A word like “index” and a domain.

That line is the title tag, and a buyer with ten tabs open reads yours before she reads anything you paid for.

So who wrote yours?

Chiropractors got handed the line too. Nearly every site in that trade carries one, and what it actually says is another matter entirely.

Nobody wrote yours

Nobody did. You typed a page name into a box, the software turned it into that line, and the job was finished before anyone had an opinion about it.

WordPress runs 36.3% of the sites I opened in this trade, and every other builder I came across behaves the same way about this one field.

Assisted living sits higher on it than you do, and not a dollar of that showing was bought.

The strongest check your trade owns is one it was handed. That isn’t an insult to you, it’s a warning about the quote in your inbox.

Because the cheap build will hand you the same free things, on time, and it will hand them to you well.

What the number at the bottom doesn’t cover

A form on your homepage isn’t a design job and it isn’t expensive. It’s an afternoon that someone actually has to spend, wiring the boxes to an email address and testing the thing twice before anyone trusts it.

26.2% of manufacturing homepages carry one. The rest ask a buyer holding a drawing to open her own mail app and start writing to a stranger.

How long has your homepage been asking people to do that?

That isn’t a failing peculiar to your trade. 28% is what I get across every trade I audit, and it stays the easiest thing on the whole list to fix.

Same story with anything that has to be written by a person. 34.2% of these sites publish a blog of any kind, so a buyer checking whether you’re still trading has your copyright date to go on and not much else.

None of that is complicated work, and I want to be careful not to make it sound heroic. It’s uncomfortable work, because it needs decisions out of you instead of instructions, and a decision is slower to buy than a page.

Your trade shows that pattern twice over. Shops name their pages carefully, then leave the fields that decide what a forwarded link looks like sitting empty.

When did anything on your site last change?

What you’re actually buying

Every quote in that pile covers a launch day. None of them covers the Tuesday six weeks later when someone notices the form stopped sending.

Launch day has a list of its own, and the cheap quote stops at the bottom of it.

Ask each of them the same question. Who does this in November? Then listen for which answer sounds rehearsed and which one sounds like an actual person with an actual calendar.

Add my ten checks together and this trade sits on 69 out of 100, which is a grade nobody would put on a wall. If you want to know which of the ten carry the weight, the recipe is written out on my methodology page.

Nobody in your building would sign for a machine and then agree that no operator was necessary. That is the arrangement most of these quotes quietly describe, and the price is low because the operator was removed from it.

A cheaper build barely moves that number in either direction. A person who comes back to the site every few weeks moves it a lot.

I’m not the cheap quote and I’d rather say so early than have you find out in a meeting. Most of what I do now is for shops in this trade, and I lose on price most months of the year.

Two questions to ask before you sign

They’re both dull, and neither is about design.

First, ask who writes the words. Not the layout, not the color of the buttons, the actual sentences that explain what your shop does and who it does it for.

Second, ask what happens in month four. If the answer is a support email address, you’ve bought a launch and nothing else.

And ask yourself one. Who owns the website in your building once the invoice is paid? If the honest answer is nobody, the price at the bottom of that quote was never the number that mattered.

Then sign whatever you like. It’s your money, and I’ve been wrong about people’s budgets before.

Tell me your shop is the exception

Some of you have a real case for signing the cheap one, and I’d like to read it.

Maybe every order in six years came through two reps and a purchasing manager who has had your cell number since before the website existed. Maybe you can name every customer you won last year and none of them found you by searching.

Which of those is true of your shop this year, rather than the year you happen to be remembering?

If that’s you, spend as little as you can. I mean that.

But the case only holds if you know it’s true, and your website can’t tell you either way, which is a separate problem I’d fix before I signed anything.

So argue with me. Send me the site and the quote you’re sitting on, tell me why the cheap one is right for a shop like yours, and if you change my mind I’ll say so out loud and put your name on it.