Bring Your Own Bag (AKA BYOB) is one of the women-owned business profiled in The Boss of You; they make gorgeous, natural cotton reusable totes (as well as their new produce bag & super-cute vintage satchel lines) right here in Vancouver. Well, they’ve got a wicked sale on right now and I thought I would share: It’s a buy one, get one free deal on any of their natural cotton totes. Of course, my personal favourite is the one they call “Cheeky” (see photo), but there are seven beautiful designs to choose from.

One of the factors that makes pricing a website tricky is that really (and forgive me for getting a bit esoteric here) websites themselves don’t really cost anything. At all. Unless you need to pay for some software licensing for things like a shopping cart or a Content Management System (CMS) or some other groovy widget on your site, there are really not any hard costs involved in designing a website. What you’re actually paying for when you get a website is the time an expertise of your website designer (or boyfriend’s roommate as the case may be) and that time and expertise is always going to vary in how it is priced.

In our case, when we get hired to design a website, our clients are hiring us to engage in a fairly formal and detailed process. A process that involves all kinds of documentation, meetings, research and strategic consulting in addition to the more tangible deliverables like design options (we typically put together more than one design option for a client to choose from), design revisions (typically anywhere from 2 to 4 rounds of revisions), and of course eventually all the code that comprises the final website in question. In terms of hours, our projects typically clock in somewhere around the 80 hours plus mark (some are in fact WAY higher and well into the hundreds). And, of course we need to charge for that time. We also charge according to our expertise level, which is at this point to be fair pretty darned high given how many years we and our staff have been in this field. Add to that the fact that we need to recoup our own hard costs (things like rent, computers, phones, internet and all the things that Lauren so masterfully explained in Chapter 3, the Finances Chapter, in our book) and you get to $10,000 websites pretty quickly.

That said, not everyone needs a $10,000 website. In fact, I’m going to venture that most of you reading this blog don’t. So what do you do? And what should a website cost you? Of course it depends on what your website is going to do, and getting clear on all of this before you go out asking for quotes is a great way to get a more accurate quote out of your website designer to be. Here’s a partial list of questions to ask yourself with regards to the kinds of functionality a website may have to guide you:

• Is your website just going to be a basic online listing that includes a description of your services/products, a bit about your company and how to contact you?
• Will you website actually sell products? If so, in how many different currencies will you sell? How many products do you have to sell?
• How often are you going to want to update your website? And do you want to do that yourself, or do you have the budget to hire someone on an ongoing basis to help with that?
• Do you need/want a photo gallery? If so, how many images will be in that gallery?
• Do you want your website to include a blog?
• Do you need a calendar for events/happenings? If so, how often will that calendar change?

Websites that include e-commerce are as a general rule more expensive than ones that don’t. That said, there are lots of great services out there you can use to get e-commerce up and running on the web on the cheaper end of things. We mentioned Shopify and Etsy in the book and I’ll write another post on e-commerce here next week along with one on how you can get your very own website without breaking the bank. So stay tuned!

(Notice how I avoided answering what a website actually does cost? Smooth huh. Really, I’ve got no hard answer to that. But this article from a few years back at Entrepreneur.com I think does a pretty good job of setting some reasonable benchmarks).

Liz is a publicist in the performing arts sector (we both studied classical music at the University of British Columbia), and with several solid years of experience under her belt she’s feeling like it’s time to go solo. I’m really excited for her and think she’s ideally suited to the entrepreneurial life; she’s smart, ambitious, and has that “fire in the belly” that’s common to all of us who want to be our own bosses. So when she wrote this review of our book on Amazon, it meant a great deal to me.

Congratulations to Emira and Lauren for writing this excellent book. I am half way through, and reading it seriously: I am reading a couple of chapters at night, and going back and answering the questions by day in writing. I plan on starting my own PR business, and this book has become a bit of a “manifesto” for me. What I love most is the basic, practical advice it offers, along with the encouragement. It’s positive and reassuring, yet direct about the pitfalls of making mistakes with your business.

Next, I love the feminist subtext of this book: that us women deserve to be paid what we’re worth, and I loved the urge (“We beg of you, close the wage gap between men and women!”) to price ourselves appropriately, and not modestly.

“The Boss of You” is hitting me on a few levels, inspires me, and is giving me courage to get my ducks in a row for the eventual launch day (still a ways off - but definitely in the works).

I really hope the Oprah producers come across this book and get these two rockin’ chicks on the Oprah show. Talk about “living your true life” - and earning a living while doing so - !

When meeting a graphic designer to work on my logo, she kept grabbing the book and flipping through it and said, “okay. I really have to get this.”

I encourage anyone (men, too) who has a dream of starting a business to get this book. My only wish is that it was edited to remain Canadian with American references (instead of the reverse) but who’s quibbling?

GET THE BOOK, PEOPLE.

Cheers,
Liz Parker
Publicist

(Thanks, Liz, for saying such nice things about our book — and for granting me permission to re-post this here.)

I mean, for starters, I fell in love with their website ages ago, and they carry just about everything Roost makes, and I suspect I may come home with an item or two for my apartment because everything in the store is drool-worthy.

But the owners are also people after my own heart, what with their hosting of monthly business/inspiration/networking events for designers they call “The Lab.”

We’ll be at The Lab next Wednesday, July 23rd from 6-8 at Velocity’s Seattle store: 251 Yale Ave N. If you’re in the Seattle area, please come! And bring some friends, and lots of questions — we really prefer to talk about whatever is most interesting to the people who are present, rather than reading from our book ad nauseam.

Hope to see you there!

And hey, on a totally off-topic note: Anyone manage to see the first episode of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before the server crashed? Well, I didn’t, and I’m antsy. I may have to shell out for the iTunes version… [Never mind, it came back up, and it’s awesome!]

So I am intrigued by this book: Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy

The blurb begins:

In an era when incomprehensibly complex issues like Peak Oil and climate change dominate headlines, practical solutions at a local level can seem somehow inadequate.

In response, Lyle Estill’s Small is Possible introduces us to “hometown security,” with this chronicle of a community-powered response to resource depletion in a fickle global economy. True stories, springing from the soils of Chatham County, North Carolina, offer a positive counterbalance to the bleakness of our age.

This is the story of how one small southern US town found actual solutions to actual problems. Unwilling to rely on the government and wary of large corporations, these residents discovered it is possible for a community to feed itself, fuel itself, heal itself, and govern itself.

If any of you have read Small is Possible, I’d love to hear your thoughts — or indeed your thoughts about small/local businesses in general.

(I also spotted another interesting-looking book from the same publisher: Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits.)

Emira and I worked out of a corner of my bedroom when we started Raised Eyebrow, graduated to the living room a little later (when space allowed), and only took on a full-time office schedule after two or three years in business. I have occasional pangs for the comfort & quiet of working from home, but now that we have a larger team, it’s much more efficient to have everyone working in the same location. That being said, we’ve been forced into working from home the last couple of days, due to a massive power outage in downtown Vancouver that took down our office building, and what Jost says about having a devoted office space is definitely true: Now that I no longer have my home computer set up for professional use, I’m nowhere near as efficient…

In addition to her praise of the book, Cinnamon has purchased a copy of the book to give away to a reader, so if you’re looking to pick up a copy check out her blog post and comment to be entered to win.

And you can expect to see a more in-depth profile of Cinnamon’s bag business here in the coming weeks as we continue to profile the amazing women who were kind enough to share their experiences for our book.

But one area that’s dead easy to police on your own is your website copy. We’ve been in business over eight years, and we’ve found our own words promoting other people’s web design services dozens of times. My favourite is when they steal our mission statement — and if you can believe it, I’ve seen that happen more times than I can count. They may think they’re being sincerely flattering, but are in fact merely lazy and dishonest. Maybe it’s my past as a teaching assistant coming out, but I have no patience for plagiarizers.

All you have to do is the Google equivalent of random drug testing.

Highlight a sentence (or part of one) on your website with your mouse, copy it to your clipboard, and paste it into Google’s search box, with quotation marks on either side. (The quotation marks tell Google you want to search for that exact phrase.) For example, I usually start my plagiarism hunt by searching for a phrase that appears in the opening paragraph on our website: “Our goal is to serve as a resource for quality website development and information”. Just that much is usually enough to generate a few hits, from the offenders who really couldn’t be bothered to make an effort. (I mean, if you’re gonna steal our copy, maybe take it from somewhere other than the home page?)

From there, I do random spot tests, grabbing a phrase from our most highly-trafficked pages, and areas that are most likely to attract thieves: descriptions of the services we offer, copy about our expertise, and of course, the mission statement (since I know it to be a gleaming bit of tinfoil for those second-string web-designer magpies). I usually turn up a handful of offenders, and I then email them one by one to point out the page(s) on their website that contain the stolen text, and request that they replace it immediately with something they’ve written.

I find for the most part people react quickly and with at least a modicum of shame. Some are polite enough to respond with an apology; others simply update their sites without replying to my emails. I’ve never resorted to legal action, though I suppose I might consider it if the offense were really significant (i.e. if they’d stolen a lot of copy), and persistent.

I recommend setting aside an hour (or less) every few months to check Google for imitators. After all, when you’ve gone to all the trouble of writing your mission statement, the last thing you want is to let someone else cheat off your homework and get away with it.