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Why EDUCO Might Not Be a Good Fit For Your Web Design Project?

Of course we love being the right fit for people and companies looking to design or redesign their website, but if we consider the numbers and the fact that our company speaks to 500 people a year, then have serious meetings with 50-100 teams, and then hand select 8-15 new teams to partner with each year.

The odds are more than likely that we will not work together. Knowing this we wanted to help tell the story of why we don't end up working with some teams. So we reached out to former prospective clients and asked them to share their thoughts.

While every prospect we haven't worked with was not available to share their feedback - here are two former prospects (that asked to remain anonymous) that were open to sharing their perspective on why they chose a different web design company to build and support their website.

  1. A National Wellness Center
  2. A National Supplier of Culinary Equipment

A National Wellness Center

Providing management and consulting services for wellness centers. They were looking to redesign their corporate site for their parent organization and also wanted to create a standardized website for their 23 wellness/fitness centers around the country.

Key Client Needs

  • CMS that could accommodate 23 unique websites
  • Serve multiple audience types
  • Site optimized to drive top of funnel traffic
  • Ability to collect data from prospective clients

Project Scope

  • Corporate Website
  • Multi-Site Strategy
  • 23 Fitness Center Sites
  • Annual Maintenance for all Digital Properties

Budget & Timeline Estimation

  • Our Estimate - $142,750
  • Proposed Timeline - 28-32 weeks

Quote from their Director of Marketing:

"I honestly wish we would have done a site visit with your team since you were in our top three, but we decided to just visit the top two.  We made a visit to one competitor and it was just not what we expected, pretty much took them out of the running. We were also:

  • Looking for A Larger Team – In the RFP and presentation your group appeared to be a little smaller (in size) than what we were looking for, we did have some negative experiences and very slow turnaround from a small team we worked with in the past.
  • Price Sensitive – your price was okay, but a little over the budget we had for the project not enough to be tossed out.  I sent the RFP to 10 companies and we brought in 4 for face to face, but I originally only wanted to bring in three.  You were in our top three for the face to face.

What we liked about your team:

  • Solid breakdown of our Google Analytics – only firm to include this in their proposal
  • Clean and Consistent design in your examples
  • Very good explanation of your process and services"

A National Supplier of Culinary Equipment

They were acquired by a private equity firm and one of the projects was to better define their brand both online and off. They needed a pretty straightforward marketing site that could also drive leads for their sales team.

Key Project Needs    

  • Properly convey their brand image
  • Drive top of funnel traffic
  • Ability to track leads
  • Marketing collateral in same style as website

Project Scope

  • Strategic Site Plan
  • Keyword research to optimize site to rank
  • 17 Content based pages
  • Ability to post articles
  • Contact form to track leads
  • Marketing collateral

Budget & Timeline Estimation

  • Our Estimate - $28,800
  • Proposed Timeline - 14-18 weeks

Quote from their Director of Marketing:

"A good portion of our decision revolved around marketing support.  However, in an effort of transparency, I don’t believe we have really utilized our new agency due to pricing of their services that were offered after the fact.  Also, we pay considerably less with our current partner.

Although, some internals would not fully admit, I believe the group decision was based around price as well.  I think we should have spent additional to get an even better product and better ongoing support to leverage the site."

How to Know If EDUCO Might Suck For My Website Project?

Hearing what these two shared one could reason that if either of the following items weigh heavy in the column of "things our new web design team must have" - EDUCO might not be a good fit:

  1. A Large Agency - Our size is not changing any time soon. We have had offers to be acquired and to expand, but we want to strategically stay small so we can focus on improving the products we build, bringing in team members with intention that share our values, and continually bringing value to our clients.
  2. Endless Services - This goes along with #1, but the long and sort of it is that we chose to be specialists. We want to be really strong in one area: planning, building and supporting scalable websites that are easy to use, easy to manage, and easy to measure. A big part of building websites is supporting, marketing and measuring them and we do offer on going services, but we would never misrepresent what we do just to win new business.

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