Cheap Doesn't Always Mean Frugal

As some of you know, I'm what you would call a "hobby mechanic". I like to work on small car engines & suspension parts in my spare time. Last summer I had finished the rebuild on the motor in my 1991 Eagle Talon TSi AWD and had spent a sizeable amount of money purchasing performance parts, having things sent in to machine shops and shipping large, heavy metal objects across the country.

It was towards the end of the summer months that I finally had the motor together and put back into the car, I was so happy. I had finally gotten the vehicle running again and got to drive it.

A matter of weeks later, it all came to a halt.

In my fervor to get the vehicle running, and my enthusiasm for "go fast parts", I cheaped out and bought a crank pulley (aka "harmonic balancer") from a knock-off company. I had read a couple reviews saying it "got the job done" and against my better judgement went ahead and bought it, since the part could be at my door in two days, and it was MUCH cheaper than the OEM alternative.
As stated, just a matter of weeks after having the motor together, the part I cheaped out on split in two, causing a catastrophic failure of the motor, and sent my pistons colliding with the valves inside the motor. Needless to say, I had to tear the ENTIRE THING apart again, and start from scratch.

Lots of time, money & enthusiasm WASTED.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen the exact same thing happen when I have to crack open a client's preexisting website. 

We get a lot of clients who come from relatively cheap developers, unsatisfied and disillusioned. They ask us to take control of their website and "bring it up to standards" and often end up kicking themselves in the butt and realizing it would have been a whole heck of a lot easier, cheaper, and effective if they had just bit the bullet and bought quality "parts" to begin with.

So in an effort to save you from the pain and suffering I went through when my beloved Eagle Talon's motor exploded that I meticulously put together, please save yourself the heartache, don't waste your time or money investing in fly-by-night web development companies who make promises they can't deliver with prices that don't make you think long and hard about making the purchase.

Building your company's website is a value-adding investment, and needs to be treated at as such. Don't buy cheap parts when you're rebuilding your engine, and don't waste your time and money paying someone to build you a sub-par web presence.

Cheap doesn't always mean frugal.

Did I miss a meeting or something?

Today we've had several character building opportunities, as my friend Tim would say.  It started this morning when I read on my Hootsuite (awesome program by the way) that the Twitter feed to my home page generated by HS was going to fail due to a change in the Twitter API (application programming interface).  Okay so Twitter has changed the way it delivers it's app to other web programs.  Great.  "Hey Chris, we need to check the Twitter feeds for our social clients and make sure they are working on each website correctly...." I said to my faithful programmer as he came in the door.

Next, I go over to Pinterest, looking for appropriate pins for clients, pinning client info and spreading the social love when my Pinterest tells me they have a new layout with larger images.  Of course I want to put that in place and when I get the new look I also notice an expanded category listing.... now I need to check the categories against the way I have my client boards categorized because if there is a better option - I need to make a change.

While working on the latest change in social realm I come across a pin from Pam the Marketing Nut (she's awesome too by the way) and guess what? Google+ decided to give us all WAY bigger profile banner images.  This means I need to update all the banner images for our clients to the much larger size - get out the photoshop!

This all takes place before noon today.  I'm just wondering, did I miss a meeting? Did all the social master minds get together and decide that they would all roll out changes today? And if I missed the meeting, maybe Facebook & LinkedIn did too because I haven't seen a dramatic change there. . . yet.  What happened to "if it ain't broke don't fix it!  I'm knocking on wood.

Hope you all have a great day!!