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What do you mean by "evaluate her requirements and build the simple online presence she needs"? If it's custom work based on a spec developed by interviewing h

What do you mean by "evaluate her requirements and build the simple online presence she needs"? If it's custom work based on a spec developed by interviewing her, it's going to take a while to do. It's probably not going to be "simple". Maybe simple off-the-shelf software will work for her though, how about Wordpress? Actual SEO takes a long time to do and has a very long-term (re: months). This will be costly. Can she afford online advertising? It's expensive (see yesterday's discussion of AdMob). Sounds like at least a couple weeks of full-time work. How much would that cost at your mother's Tai Chi instructor rate? 80 x $50/hr? Many web consultants charge more. Even at $50/hr that's at least $4k + the inevitable extra time required. Sounds expensive and not so simple. This probably will come off sounding really harsh about your question but cost is what it really comes down to. There's a gap between what people need to charge to make it work for them and what small businesses like your mother's are likely willing to pay. How can that be closed? Standard software. Not evaluating her requirements.

DanI-S 15y ago
It's certainly true that a fully custom solution costs more money than is available. However, there are only a finite number of custom solutions out there. Once you've built a solution for one Tai Chi instructor, a very similar solution will work for most other Tai Chi instructors, as well as Karate instructors and piano instructors and the guy who will teach you how to arrange flowers. I think that a large enough organization (even a loose collective of individuals sharing best practices) could reduce per-customer overhead sufficiently to allow this to work at scale. With a collective memory of thousands of 'unique' (but only to a point) situations, it'd be far less costly to offer custom service.

DanI-S 15y ago

It's certainly true that a fully custom solution costs more money than is available. However, there are only a finite number of custom solutions out there. Once you've built a solution for one Tai Chi instructor, a very similar solution will work for most other Tai Chi instructors, as well as Karate instructors and piano instructors and the guy who will teach you how to arrange flowers. I think that a large enough organization (even a loose collective of individuals sharing best practices) could reduce per-customer overhead sufficiently to allow this to work at scale. With a collective memory of thousands of 'unique' (but only to a point) situations, it'd be far less costly to offer custom service.