I had a conversation with a casual friend the other night. He was complaining about his website- doesn’t like the look all that much, doesn’t like the navigation…. but he especially doesn’t like the cost or the abuse from his web master.

If he needs a few line edits done, like changing his pricing, adding a new service, even fixing a spelling mistake, or making sure one hex-color matched another hex-color (really?!), he would have to pay this guy $50 an hour. And then, when he learned enough HTML to go in and fix things himself from time to time, he got nasty-grams warning him of the cost to repair a broken website. The funniest part of the story was the web master’s annoying use of “pointless” “quote” “marks” in a way that my friend found insulting.

Attention Annoying and Condescending Web Masters:
Your days are numbered.

We know your tricks. We know why you still use straight HTML instead of CMS. We know how you scare us into worrying about site breakage. We know how you hack together poorly written HTML files with half-done CSS and deprecated style tags. We know why you have thrown us into the dark pits of Go Daddy and Network Solutions… all so you can be the one, the only guide capable of navigating us through your obnoxious mix of bad design, arcane coding, and poor user interface. Shoot- if my only option was Go Daddy, I’d probably pay someone else to do things, too.

But as I said, your days are numbered. The rise of easy to install, easy to customize, and easy to maintain CMS solutions means that your clients can and should be able to make updates, add content, and do minor tweaking without your hourly rates. At the same time that technology has made the job of web self-mastery much easier, the economy has made the monthly expense of a “Guru” incredibly unappetizing.

You never should have been acting like this, y’all. Letting your clients do things themselves frees you up to pursue more clients, and also gives them a better appreciation for what you actually do. The web-guy-as-roadblock is a bad business model, besides being incredibly annoying (and probably unethical).

To do my part in the downfall of the Gurus and the rise of (ahem) Bootstrapping, I am now offering a Fire Your Webmaster program. Here’s the basic idea:

Fire Your Web Master!

You have a website. It works reasonably well, you sort of like the design… but you want to stop paying “that guy” a few hundred a month to… what? Do routine maintenance? A few line edits here and there?

Thought Leaders update their website content continuously. They blog, they add resources, they try new products and services, they add libraries of useful articles… Are you paying someone by the hour for stuff you could do yourself in twenty minutes if you just knew how?
Or worse… Are you not adding content? Not blogging? Not updating? Not trying out new things?
…All because you can’t afford to pay your “web master” enough?

We will take over the management of your site, convert it to a user-friendly Content Management System, and teach you how to do routine tasks and updates. If you want to finally get around to that minor design make-over or that major site overhaul, we can take care of that too.

Stop putting up with abuse from the web-literate (it’s not that profound a skill, really), take ownership of your site, and FIRE YOUR WEBMASTER!

Pricing will be determined per job, based on the complexity and needs of your current site, but all pricing will be a predetermined, flat rate. We will also offer a payment plan option that allows you to smear your payments out over several months if you need to.

Hope it helps!

I’m hopeful my friend takes me up on the offer, but even if he decides to go with one of the other fine web design firms in town- I think he will be much happier, and more profitable, once he fires his webmaster.

Bootstrap that!