Here are are few of the sights that have caught my eye (for better or worse) recently.
Great Way to Set Client Budget Expectations
Web design firm, Sidebar Creative, use a slider on their contact form for clients-to-be to estimate the budget for their project. The default setting is $100,000 and the lowest setting is $10,000.
This is an excellent way to deflect clients who don’t have sufficient budget for their services and also to set expectations for larger clients that this firm is capable of dealing with larger and more expensive projects.
A Fly Out List to End Them All
Mouse over the red ‘Newsweek’ link on MSNBC’s Newsweek site and you are ‘treated’ to the longest fly out list I’ve ever seen. At 660px tall it probably won’t even fit on most people’s monitors.
I think a regular directory page might have been the way to go here.
3D Ski Resort Maps
Ski.com now has 3D maps of many of the resorts it promotes. Here’s one of Whistler. This is a wonderful idea as it’s often hard to get an idea of the layout of a ski resort from the usual 2D map.
I have to admit that I’m not impressed by the gimmicky resort choser which is basically high-tech mystery meat navigation and fails on every count as a good navigation device.
I saw the sidebar contact form and had similar thoughts. Should be a great tool for a group such as Sidebar, where most of inquiring clients are going to have a good idea of who the members of the group are and their value well before they go to the site.
For those of us who are not quite as notorious, I wonder if asking clients budget is a wise choice.
I think it’s a good idea to give some idea of pricing to potential clients. This will help deter those clients are not going to be able to afford you. I used to receive a lot of emails from people wanting a web site, which was about all the information they gave me to go on.
Most of the time they did not turn into gigs because their expectations of what a site would cost was unreasonably low. Having a filtering mechanism like this in place will help to avoid these types of inquiries, which are basically just wasting your time.
On the other side, I think it’s just as important in establishing credibility with larger clients to show that you are capable of working on larger budget projects (if that’s where your market is).