If you are buying a house or a car you are always given a contract with certain conditions. It’s no different with contractual work for IT services, for example, web design and development. Every online business will have to go through complicated contracts eventually.
It pays to understand them, and I do mean it literally. If you understand web contracts and their conditions, it’s easier to expand the initial offer, or at the least protect yourself from additional costs.
I have absolutely nothing against web development agencies, but they function like any other company – for profit.
A clever and revenue-focused web development agency can make a huge dent in a business that is trying to stay afloat.
Additional web development costs are usually excluded from the contracts, although there might be information on the amount charged per hour for any additional web development. This is usually somewhere between $150-$350, but it can be as high as $500 per hour in some cases.
If you don’t specify on the contract what needs to be done and by when each extra hour dedicated to figuring it out during the development stage will cost you extra. This can easily run into $1000’s per month.
More importantly, it will procrastinate everything and you might even fail to deliver the project within the estimated time. Obviously, most web development companies will have multiple clients on contract whom they have to service.
Any additional work is usually put to the side for later. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to be part of that later pile.
Preparation is the key to staying within the scope of your project. You should know exactly what you need in terms of your web development before you set out to sign any contracts.
Each web development contract must include an exact quote for every part of the development, including its estimated finish time.
Your web manager can help in negotiations
If you are not a web developer and you don’t have a lot of experience with building complex web projects, you will likely need a web manager to help you understand your web contracts.
More importantly, an experienced web manager will help you take advantage of your buyer position. You may have to pay $150-$500 for the comfort of having a consultant on your side, but you are very likely to save $1000s on your contract negotiations.
Most cost reductions are made by optimizing the workflow or removing unnecessary features suggested by the web development company.
Don’t be so surprised, most companies are pushing additional and unnecessary products to their clients, so this is a standard practice of most companies. Nothing unusual here.