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...
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
Finally, all that time making the coolest myspace profile pays off!
"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
Honestly, I think that line of thought has a really cute reflection of the person's experience with technology.
Permanently Deleted
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.
For $500 I'd slap together some fitting WordPress stuff to suit their subject matter and teach them about domain registry and hosting. Then I'd tell them to come back to me with more if they're interested in any specific features they're not interested in implementing themselves later.
$500 is worth a little bit of work and I can give them a product that's as aimless as their ambition for it. They certainly can't get more than they're asking for if they don't know what to ask for.
Chances are this is a kid or NEET and all his friend wants is a super simple website with basic info for his local business. Dad is either doing him a favor, or giving him some pocket change so he'll stop bothering him for money for a month. This is what happens when you don't teach your children to be adults, and give them everything instead. Seen it too many times.
Yeah true, many examples could bee true, like the kid could even be a prick and this could be for his buddy that needs a cancer donation page, Like this one.
I could not know, nor can you, due to the limited information we received, I made up a scenario and you made up a scenario. I think chances, like you mentioned in the start, are neither of us being correct or incorrect, we both are just talking around Schrodinger's website
£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.
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.
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.)
I don't get it.
We have only 1080px in vertical, part of which is also used for Taskbars, titlebars and toolbars in most cases. Then there is this trend of sites not using most of the horizontal space for main body text.
So, what reason do we have to not use the wasted side-space and instead congest the already low vertical space?I would understand if it were a mobile-only site or if you were explicitly talking about the vertical version of it, but even for 4:3, I won't consider a sidebar to be a bad idea, unless perhaps, it was German.
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.
I'm still not sure exactly what Project Managers do. I've seen countless job postings and even stories from people claiming to have been one. Yet, more often than not they get shit on, and memes often have a kernel of truth. #ConfusedHumanPerson
They are supposed to be the glue that binds the internal team together as well as bonding to external groups.
The project manager organises external requirements and steers the project in the direction needed for the business. That direction might change depending on the status of other projects, it's their job to be on top of that.
They also report progress and roadblocks upstream so that those who manage groups of related projects can work on keeping everything running.
Whether they're actually competent, well that's something else entirely.
Yet when I have a good one versus a bad one I can definitely tell the difference.
Many roles main responsibility is to report upwards what happens in"the basement". Which includes translating what one person says into that the other can understand. Then there's roles that do it both ways.
If there's time to spare, a good project manager can also bring health and common sense to the team they're part of. That takes pointing out non sense both inside and outside the team, and the hardest part - being constructive about it.
I like to put my estimates in writing somehow.
"My initial and unbiased estimate is 3 months." Put it in an email, nothing will ever change the fact that my initial estimate was 3 months.
Ideally your estimates would just be complexity points. And those estimates would go on on the stories in Jira/Azure Dev Ops / wherever
And honestly the team should meet up and discuss the estimates
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
If he was serious, your dad seems like a prick that sees you as an appendage that he owns...
This seems as good an opportunity as any to tell him to go fuck himself and learn some boundaries - not sure if you need to hear this, but blood doesn't get a pass just for being blood. Make ALL the people in your life earn their place there by treating you decently.
Woah buddy, you're at about a 9, we need you down at a 3.
"Dad" doesn't know anything about web design, but he knows (presumably son) makes them, and he ballparked a number making the entirely common armature mistake of thinking it's as easy as setting up your facebook page. He's also not demanding anything here. Nothing about this exchange suggests that "Dad" was going to require that the work be done at the stated price. It seemed like
Maybe before you go burning bridges and obliterating a family relation, consider how much easier it is to tell "Dad's Buddy" that while Dad was well meaning, he was way off, and Buddy is free to compare with other estimates, but $X is actually a much more reasonable value.
You're not, OP....
also, feels pretty obvious you haven't been involved in bidding jobs before - these initial numbers set expectations. If "dad" valued the kid's talent and time, he would have said, "they'll give you a number" and/or the message to kid would not have been closed, it would have been open. So instead of, "you'll do this, thanks bye" it would be a question to kid prior saying, "I know a lot goes into your work, is $500 a good ballpark to give my friend for something like this?"
It's about expectations and entitlement - you're essentially my property, so I decided it would be this is indicative of a problem with "dad's" approach.
lol
Cool
