Psychology and the true cost of web design
This is where, usually, marketing meets psychological manipulation. You know what I’m talking about. Large, carefully chosen photos that make you desire or crave the product. Time-limited introductory offers (that never end) to draw you in. The closing move is to get you to contact them.
Fun fact: nearly all modern marketing practices lead back to a disgraced and arguably sociopathic psychologist called John B. Watson. He was a behaviourist who believed humans are at heart little evolved from brute animals whose behaviour could be predicted and controlled. The sweet counter by the supermarket tills, tempting your toddler, that was one of Watson’s ideas. To be fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong, but when you are conditioning the masses for profit, it crosses a few moral lines.
B.F. Skinner, though purely an academic, was of a similar mind, sans psychopathy. He gave us terms like ‘operant conditioning’ and denied the existence of a free will. Those loot boxes in games are called ‘Skinner boxes’ for a reason.
Even something as simple as that 99p ice cream; it’s not a pound’; it’s “under a pound”. You are getting change, you still get something back. It’s all down to cognitive biases and ‘money brains’. (Oops, Freudian slip, I meant ‘monkey brains’, of course). Professor Steve Peters called it the chimp paradox.
Daniel Kahneman literally wrote the book on cognitive biases (Thinking Fast and Slow) and commented on how ingrained it is. He also won a Noble prize for integrating psychological insights into economics, demonstrating how humans make decisions, particularly in situations of uncertainty. Humans, like monkeys, are loss averse, leading us to behavioural economics. Kahneman was one of the good guys, but the research just adds to the pile of mind tricks available to others.
What does this have to do with web design options and plans, you may wonder.
If you are searching for a web developer or hosting, variations of the following will probably be familiar to you:
“Web design and hosting from just 99p a day”
– because saying it is actually over £360 a year plus extras is much less appealing.
“Includes HTML5…”
– neglecting to mention that all do, that without such features you wouldn’t have a website.
– Also, well, others mention it, so we’d better include it. Ticked that box!
“Includes SSL”
– All do, I cannot think of a single host that doesn’t offer free SSL with all packages.
– If you are with a web developer that does not give you FREE SSL, walk away, move, find someone else!
– Seriously, if they want paying for a bog standard SSL, run!
– (High end certificates for eCommerce are another matter)
“T&C apply”
– All the rest, written using baffling legal terms, in really tiny letters
It’s all about the sales
It seems to me – very reasonably – that most people don’t know or want to know about the underbelly of a website.
They may know they ‘need’ one for their business, but maybe they’re a plumber; they don’t want to be learning about web stuff. Especially not after twisting their body under sinks, or their arm up a u-bend after some kids flushed their teddy.
“Nope, nooo, thank you. I want a pint and a curry in front of the tele. I am done for the day!”
Honestly, my mate is a fabricator and handyman; when I started talking to him about what CSS he’d like and how he’d prefer DIVs positioned for his website, he threw a dog toy at me! Then he picked up a spanner to follow it. Your average sole trader or small business cannot be expected to understand web design. It’s too big, too complicated and too fast changing.
If you have watched a web design agency at work, they simultaneously manage to be obsequious and condescending. They know you don’t understand. You know you don’t understand. Yet it’s all smiles and nodding agreement (as you are shepherded into the wolf’s den of hourly billing).
I take more of a box-shifting approach!
I used to sell custom-built computers; some of my customers only needed to type; some were gamers, others engineers. Would you like to know the difference between building a £499 computer and one for £4,999? Nothing! It’s almost the same time and effort. You can argue that you need to take more care with the cabling on the latter one, but it’s essentially Lego: case, motherboard, cards….
Web design is similar.
But there is a difference that I don’t believe many web designers are honest about. A personal computer is built for you, whereas a website is built for people you don’t know! If you are building a website for ‘you’ you miss the point of having a website.
Most web designers love to show off their features, such as sliding images, accordions and colourful tables, all dropped into place with something like Elementor.
They love it so much they want you to have the same, for a price.
Then you look at Google, made for everyone else. Not a lot of fancy features, are there?
So, I prefer and recommend designing lean, clean-looking sites.
Feature image by Gerd Altmann, from Pixabay
