It has taken a lot of effort to get this webpage off the ground to what it is that you are reading today about web designing for an MBA Student? The time and energy exerted and MBA student was enormous. I am proficient in finance; web design is not my specialty because i am an MBA student. Since this is a personal finance website let’s discuss this a little further for our clarification.
Say it took me about 40 hours to design the my MBA degree website I don’t know exactly what it has taken from me. I should have kept track but I didn’t think of this until last night. Assume my hourly rate of pay is $30.00 for my this MBA degree site. If I had paid myself to create this website it would have cost me $1,200. I did a quick Google search to come up with some hourly rates for a web designer, they ranged from 75-125 an hour.
The content on this site should be relatively easy for a web designer to set up. We know that it will not take the web designer nearly the amount of time that it took me to complete the task they can probably do it in a quarter of the time. It could have cost me between $750 ($75 per hour * 10 hours) and $1,250 ($125 per hour * 10 hours) to develop my website into what it is today. If you would have asked me to pay someone $750 dollars to design the website I would have looked at you like you were crazy, but we fail to realize that our time is money. I could have worked a second job for that same time period and made the $1,200 dollars and paid the web designer $750 and been ahead $450.
The point I am trying to make is that just because you are not personally paying someone to do something for you, your time invested still is a cost to you. It could be seen as the finance principle opportunity cost. If I had used my money for the website design we might have had to forgo some other alternative that the money would have been used for ie: a bill or diapers. Finance is all around us and we may not even know that we just did opportunity cost analysis to determine that I should pay bills and diapers with my income rather than a web designer.
As mentioned in the previous post we are currently a single income house household and with 2 children until next week when Mrs. MBA starts her job. My rationale behind attacking the project on my own was that due to limited resources I should try to do what I can on my own and with the help of Google. I want to venture out there and succeed or fail with the set of skills I was given.
Have you ever undertaken a task that you knew nothing about to save a buck?
You did a great job in 40 hours. For me my site design is a constant work in process. It is pretty complicated. When I was done with it (relatively done) I felt like a pro! But I am not a pro, far from it. 🙂
It looked foreign the first time I set up WordPress. Thankfully my friend Google and I got along quite well, and quite a few really late nights. It was tough going to bed some nights when I had so many ideas in my head that I wanted to get out.
How true. I have taken many projects on at home, that now I can admit it, that I knew so little or nothing about. My philosophy has always been, try it myself first. IF it fails, worst case, I’d have to hire it out anyways. BUT, what a learning experience and a huge thrill accomplishing it yourself, and handing down what I learned to my kids is the biggest sense of accomplishment.
@ Tim – very true about taking on the projects, as long as you don’t make the project worse than when you started and end up spending more money 🙂