I remember walking up to store owners in DHA Lahore, asking them if they would want a website for their store. I am talking ‘back in the day’, while still at college, six to seven years ago.

A lot of the times, people would respond somewhere in the lines of, ‘I have heard of them websites, tell me what it is and maybe I will get you to make it for me.’ The Marketing students reading this, take note, this was the introductory stage of the product life cycle and ‘theory’ like that. Anyways, I would tell them what it is and how they could benefit from it. (Yes, 6 to 7 years back, there was less benefit of an online presence for a local store in Lahore, and it was much harder than it is now to sell websites and web development. But the benefit for a website developed in Lahore for a local business was beneficial back then as well).

I did try to sell websites by being very cheap. I stopped doing that years ago. For a very valid reason of course; quality comes at a price. I put a lot of effort into making a website, I hire expensive programmers to code even the basic of codes to get the best out in the market. Of course, sometimes I mess up, but I know I can deliver, God willing, because the cheap guy hardly wins. At the end of the day, I don’t pay the expensive programmer just because he is expensive, but because he or they deliver on time and deliver what was asked after following best practices. Goes without saying, I learnt that the hard way. The very hard way.

Now, things have changed. Now people usually ask for a website themselves. Surely, the times have changed. Website development in Lahore has definitely picked up, with a lot of people offering web design and development services. At the end of the day, it will not be who is offering what, but it will be how are they servicing the customer. For as I still strongly maintain, business is about relatoinships and their maintenance thereof.