Later after you turn down this very generous offer.
„How can you bring such shame to me, ive already told him you’ll do it”
Some decade and change ago I used to sell people Drupal installs at £200 a pop. They'd get a pretty secure codebase, the ability to add content through a gui and if necessary have customer accounts.
Pretty much what killed it as a business was everyone expected to be on the first page of Google because business advisers were telling them that sitebuilders should do SEO as standard.
ironically this is what killed google, every shitty business or bad website wants to game the system to be on the first page
I got something similar in a requirement specification once:
"Resolution supported: Max" "OS support: The latest one"
🤦🏼
I literally got the description "make it look cool" in my current project.
We all know the context and can roughly guess what it means, but still...
make it look cool
Got it. Animated background, GIFs, HTML 4.01 frames, marquee, privacy-friendly ads which are just GIFs linking to other websites. Did I go too far with the last one?
That sounds fucking awesome.
I used to have one like that, only with more tables (using the default border, of course).
It what's later became known a "programmer design".
Why so fancy? Sites like this are famous with millions of views: https://web.archive.org/web/20041229194455/http://www.ikissyou.org/indeks2.html
Stuff like this is part of why I dropped out of multimedia production in college, I only enjoy that stuff as a hobby for myself, doing it for other people is a creative nightmare lol
"OS support: The latest one” is not that bad of an requirement...
If they complain like "why doesn't this work on Windows Vista, on IE8" - you can just point to the specs and say you only support the latest OS.
So basically you only support the latest Nightly Build of Ubuntu, since that's the current latest OS
You don't even need to support anything older than the last windows hot fix with requirements like that.
Why support windows when you can argue that linux has a newer OS?
I am humbled by your chess of many D's.
I would take the $500 upfront and just log in to Squarespace or whatever website building service there is, do a simple design, tell him he needs to pay this subscription, argue with him and dad why there must be monthly or annual fees and they could have done this themselves for cheaper, whichever way they chose to pay the subscription or not I still get $500 for 2 hours work and the knowledge my father won't bother me again with website designs
This is the way.
£500 gets you a sit down meeting and a website design drawn in crayon on a napkin.
While we're there, we can also talk about the cost for website development and why you shouldn't talk to dad about websites ever again.
Like bro that's not even a full day of work how much do you think I make?
Being a salesman must be so easy. Scam the customer, scam the people actually putting the thing together, scam the business itself
The United Scams of Assholes.
The scummy sales person is a stereotype. They exist sure but if you've ever worked with a good one they can really help particularly if you're buying something complex. I used to work for a company that sold complex manufacturing equipment and without a salesperson theres no way most customers would know what they needed to maintain it etc.
Technical Sales Vs Sales
One's an engineer with something to sell. The other is a grifter.
As an engineer i hate both, technical sales never have an understanding of their product and are never able to answer any of my questions (because i've read through the datasheet as their words are meaningless to me) but they are mooooorrrreee than happy to schedule an in person meeting to come to my office and show me their product line.
Tell me what i want to know or find me someone who can, im not going to buy 10,000 of whetever if i cant even determine if they will work for my use case.
The last time i had to deal with one of these assholes it took 3 phone calls and 2 emails to get a simple answer which wasnt in their datasheet, which was all of one page long.
My favorite experience with technical sales is we had these component guys come in, they had openned up our product and wanted to show how much better their "equivalent" components were (genuinely a great idea), but they had no context as to what the components were being used for so they all fell flat.
In my experience both are only a waste of my time.
My dad asked me if I could build a site for him. I tried, but ultimately didn't have the chops (I can customize Wordpress, but this was supposed to be from scratch and I didn't keep up when things like CSS came into being; old). I sent him to hire an outside party.
Here's the thing: he wanted his menus vertical on the left side. I told him that's not how it should be done; they should be at the top. But he was adamant. Later, he told me that his web consultant shop had also said the same. It's the only time he ever said, "you were right," about anything like in my entire life. Not that he was an asshole (though he really was when I was growing up). It's just not something he said. And no one can take that from me. I even called my mom and told her.
And now... Lots of websites with menus on the left!
Still, happy for you that your dad could humble himself to you. That's really hard for some people, even when they'd like to, it's like your brain just won't compute how to say it without coming out wrong so you never say it.
Your dad is right. On desktop, navigation is on the left. On tablet, you shrink it to a rail. On mobile it should be a dismissible nav drawer.
The top menus, especially the flyover(on mouse hover), are bad for accessibility because they convert a non-committal action (hover) to a context changing one (focus). It's a uniquely web-only invention and thankfully falling out of usage. (Unless you mean menubar/toolbar. Those are fine but extremely rare on Web.)
Geez... Project managers are forbidden from making work estimates- they only get to collect them.
They don't get to argue estimates either. They can ask questions to gain understanding but the estimates are the estimates.
Wearing an architect or chief engineer hat is sometimes more fun because you get to call bullshit on dumb estimates like "4 to 5 weeks to model a table with 7 fields, with 2 of them being PK, FK" like GTFO we can model it in the next 5 minutes if I talk slowly.
Based on this interaction alone and his dad deciding the price for him, I'm going to make the wildly assumptious assumption this is a 20s/30s(/40s?) unemploymed guy living at his dad's house rent free.
If my assumptions are incorrect, sorry mate, you did not win the dad lottery.
Non-technical project managers are the worst lol
I think it depends. I've had a non-technical PM and he was great. He knew he knew nothing about development and as such did what great managers do, create an environment where we could work as efficiently as we could. If we said it takes X amount of time he wouldn't try to squeeze out a faster deadline, he'd report "it will take X amount of time". If we said it's unreasonably to take feature Y in he'd say we're not going to take feature Y in.
IMO it's much harder with PMs who did some development 20 years ago and "know how things are done". The ones with some technical knowledge almost always butt in.
I still think about how the project manager, the wife of the CEO, told me the icon she wants me to replace is about 2 inches, on a 17-inch monitor.
Wait. Technical project managers exist?
For the first year or so they become PMs they try.
Could be easy money
Could be a "You can't let John down now, we're old pals, and a few people expect the site to work by the end of the week. He just needs a site like Facebook, but for gardeners"
Might be an afternoon of CSS, or might be 2+ weeks of React
Even just an afternoon of CSS would mean 2-4 hours, plus setting everything up, plus talking to the client, revisions, etc. You'll quickly end up with 10h overall, even if the actual task is rather small. And that's the optimistic case.
So you'll end up with maybe 50€/h , probably more like 30. Not terrible, but that's the optimistic case.
I mean, I'd contact the guy and say upfront what 500 quid will get him.
But I appreciate the PM joke.
He was probably expecting a finder's fee too
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