And You Said You Never Win Anything
For those who come looking for a short, thoughtful read, a blogging life discussion, or a way to gradually ease back into the week. I offer this bloggy life hypothetical question. . . .
At the grand opening of a social network, they gave away prizes. By some stroke of luck you won the grandest prize of all. It’s a $10K blog vacation on an island in a luxury private home for two weeks while your blog gets a $10K makeover by a famous blog designer.You were excited, bought the sunscreen, made the plans. Then you met with the famous designer. He didn’t listen to a thought you had. Even worse, his favors a color — one that you absolutely cannot stand.
You’re getting a bad feeling.
The rules are that the vacation and blog design are one package. As part of the prize you get to live with new blog design for one year or you happily get to pay the designer.
It’s time for you to accept the prize by signing your permission and releases.
How do you respond?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Nice challenge. Basically, do I want a holiday at any price or do I want my business to grow organically and well?
If your blog is part of your business, it makes very bad sense to get seduced by the holiday idea into letting someone else effectively modify your brand into something you do not comfortably feel represents you and your business.
My personal view also is that there are so many excellent templates/themes available that you can build a perfectly good profile – and people have – with an off the shelf, fully costed in, site from Typepad or BlogHarbor or Squarespace or WordPress. My web/blog designer friends would no doubt protest, but when people tell me what they are paying for a web/blog design they tell me what it’s costing (usually with a wince) and not how much it’s going to make because of the swish design.
I understand about getting the back end right but even a lot of that is taken care of without spending thousands, unless perhaps you are talking larger enterprise. But I read this current challenge as being more about “look and feel”, which impacts directly on brand.
I would be declining the offer and strongly advising any client not to hobble themselves for a year with this “prize”.
Sorry I made you wait, Des. Please forgive me for that. Welcome to the blog! It’s great to see you here!
I have the same response as you and then, I take one step further and one to whom I might give the prize. Would I give it to a friend or to that guy who thinks he knows it all? If I gave it no one I would always wonder what the designer wouls have done. If I give it Mrl Know-it-all it just might backfire on me. 🙂
Walk away. If you take the prize, you could pay for a year emotionally. If you don’t use the design you pay financially. Either way you lose. Is it worth two weeks of fun, which has already been clouded?
Walk away. Walk away. I’m walking. I guess I’ve still never won anything really cool. 🙂
It would have to depend who the famous blog designer was .. his/her hourly rates .. and what time of year that the 2-weeks would be on a private island.
A year can go by very quickly .. I think I would take the prize.
PS. Although I think I have more creativity in my baby pinky finger than about half of the designers I’ve met in real life and online do .. there are also people out there in the other half that can create things I could never imagine in my wildest imagination (and I would like to think I can be wild at times too :D). You would have to be pretty anal to reject a great design with a color you can’t stand .. especially if other readers and customers don’t hate that color.
HART,
Any guy who can handle a car that lost a wheel into a biker bar I think can take on a risk like this and survive it. 🙂
Hey Liz,
That’s a provocative bloggy question. If there is no rule on how I dispense my holiday vacation, then I will sell the holiday package to someone else and use the money to pay the designer to design a color I like.
Generally, I’m ok with most of the web colors except for girly pink, lemon yellow, purplish pink, and completely black. If the designer has this combination (how the heck he becomes a famous webdesigner with that kind of taste is very questionable), then I would just walk away. Too much work for me to edit.
Like Rick, I don’t want to suffer a year of hateful emotion.
Liz
You’ve said it, if you gave it to someone else wouldn’t you be wondering if you had given them a problem rather than a gift?
Hi Renée
I hear you about the girlie pink, I had that response at first to the shade of “rose” on this design . . . it was a little too to pink for me to want to try — I come from all boys neighborhood after all and the worst insult I grew up with is You throw like a girl and run like one too.
Then I realized that was a personal response not a business one and I sat back to give it a chance. It wasn’t girlie pink after all and it is the best color for the color palette. 🙂
Yeah, Des,
The interest part would be, I probably out think myself . . . if I tried to give the problem I very might give the prize. 🙂
Liz,
Generally when I find myself thinking too hard about something, the right answer was the gut instinct I had in the first 10 seconds.
In this case, if I wasn’t looking for a new design, I wouldn’t assume the emotional baggage Rick describes.
Besides, you didn’t say the prize included money to cover the taxes…;-)
Mike
Hi Mike!
You have a point there about the taxes. There’s no cash to cover the bat to get the designer’s attention either. 🙂
Liz, if it sounds too good to be true – guess what…
I wouldn’t take a package like this. It sounds great and I might be excited about the opportunity. But what do I feel under the excitement? A web design, in my opinion, needs to carry something from your essence. If it doesn’t, the designer is irrelevant.
I simply wouldn’t take the deal.
No one is putting yellow on my site… i refuse. I would rather not have the vacation and spend the time redesigning it myself, even though i am not an expert designer (not a $10k at least).
It’s a matter of principles.