The best is only just good enough.

I found a great quote in My Documents today - I'd saved it there after copying it from a shop window poster, so I have no idea who originally said or wrote it:
"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten."

How true - and how often it's forgotten!

Mind you, low price doesn't necessarily mean poor quality. If you buy a cashmere jumper in the sales at half price (low-ish, anyway!) it's still a cashmere jumper, and a jolly good buy by most standards. I'm thinking of a cheap acrylic jumper, that feels lovely and soft when you first buy it but looks like rubbish when it's pilled after the first couple of washes, not to mention the fact that it won't keep you warm. That sort of poor quality is never worth spending your hard-earned on.

My grandfather apparently (I never met him) used to say "The best is always the cheapest" - meaning that the best lasts longer than however many cheaper ones you'd have to buy to replace each other when they wore out/broke/looked awful. The best is built to last, fit for purpose tomorrow as well as today. If you're totally fashion-conscious and throw your clothes away at the end of every season, then cheap might just be OK, but for normal folk it's a waste of money.

The same is true of employing freelancers. There's no point hiring someone just because they don't charge much; there's probably a reason for it. If you want work done right, first time, on time, choose someone who has enough pride in themselves to charge a decent fee. They'll take pride in their work for you, too and save everyone stress, time - and, in the long run, money. Hire the best: not necessarily the most expensive, but definitely not the cheapest.

And hire someone who's trained to do the job. Don't just use someone from the office because they're there. I get very depressed reading websites (there are loads of them) that have obviously just been copied straight from the company brochure - who do they think is reading the site? Do they have the site up there just for potential investors, or do they actually want customers? Because if it's the latter, they need to sell, not tell. They need to focus on the reader and his/her wants, needs and desires, grab him by the wallet and make him buy Right Now This Minute before he has a chance to navigate away to another site that does want his business.

If you're in the position of setting up or revamping a website, and you don't have a trained copywriter in-house, do yourself and your company a favour: hire one. A good one. And be prepared to pay a decent fee for her efforts.

Thank you very much :-))