How it all began…

As is so often the case, the best ideas come from a desire to improve an existing way of doing things, a thought that goes something like 'surely there must be a better way?' evolve was born out of that exact thought, let me explain how.

Training and working in the graphic and website design industry in the UK, every company that I came across, trained or worked with tended to use the same business model: the hourly rate model. The hourly rate business model certainly has its place, but in my opinion when it comes to creating websites, is fundamentally flawed.

The start of a project usually goes something like this: The designer meets with client and discusses what the client is looking to achieve. The designer then goes away and prepares a quote, based on the work required and an estimate of the time that work will take, multiplied by the designer’s hourly rate. If the client’s happy with the quoted price then work begins. Now for a project that is a one-off and that goes exactly as initially discussed that’s fine, but in the real world, and particularly the world of the web, that rarely happens.

Instead, what tends to happen is that the brief changes along the way. Often that’s no fault of the client or the designer, it’s just the way things go. Using the hourly rate model where a fixed price has been agreed this presents a problem. Either the designer goes back to the client and charges more or the designer swallows the cost of the extra work, creating a feeling of resentment towards the client. The former often creates bad feelings from the client towards the designer whilst the latter creates bad feelings in the opposite direction.

It was whilst creating websites for our clients using this model that I had the classic thought ‘surely there must be a better way?’ I was convinced there must be a better model to use, I just wasn’t sure what it was. Whilst researching business models and how different businesses and sectors operate I came across an amazing book called ‘The Medici Effect’ by Frans Johansson. In it, Frans talks about how inspiration and ideas can be taken from one industry into another, bringing a fresh approach not seen before.

This lead me to think about the mobile phone industry. No-one goes out and buys a new iPhone for £600. They sign up to a contract with a phone company, who gives them an iPhone free of charge along with a monthly allowance of calls, text messages and data. Why could the same model not be applied to websites?

What we came up with was evolve. By offering a range of plans that include monthly updates, and even one that includes unlimited updates, we could now offer a truly flexible model that would allow clients the freedom to make as many changes to their website as they wanted.

“Unlimited updates means we’re not afraid to try new things that would have cost a fortune before.”

The beauty of the evolve model is that it allows clients complete freedom to market their businesses. So often a company will launch a new service or have a great piece of news that they want to share with the world, but not have the time, resources or money to update the website to reflect that. evolve removes those barriers so that all a client needs to do is drop us an email or give us a call and we’ll take care of the whole thing for them.