oliveremberton

Not all companies get joy out of charging their customers to make their websites worse. Heaven forbid we're not all entirely motivated by money.

And these websites are not all "tuppenny-ha'penny". Examples I'm personally familiar with include Universities and companies with revenue between £5-80m / year. Updating their sites is not trivial nor is it cheap.

I despise the idea of a law we're told to obey, but expected to be cunning enough to avoid.

I'm the creator of the video. Just to clarify a few things:

1. I'm not against better privacy. Just a poorly written law.

2. The law doesn't just cover cookies - it also applies to HTML5 Local Storage, Flash objects etc. "Cookie Law" is a popular abbreviation.

3. It may not be realistic to challenge the law, but I believe we should try.

For those doubting the veracity of these claims, here are some references:

KPMG: 95% of UK websites not compliant with law http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3350059/95-p...

TechCrunch: Stupid EU cookie law will kill our startups stone dead http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/09/stupid-eu-cookie-law-will-h...

Wired: The EU's legal war on cookies is barking mad http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/11/cookies-regul...

BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13541250

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/13/new-law-coo...

Plus of course the site mentioned by the video (my site): http://nocookielaw.com/

(Oliver from Silktide here, I wrote that article).

Might be useful to see our own Terms, they're still online here:

www.silktidestudios.com/tandc

We always charged 50% upfront for anything over £1,000 (about $1,600). Projects over around £20,000 usually had three way splits.

Of course some bigger contracts (esp. government) insist on their own onerous terms but usually they're decent payers.

Hmm. Perhaps I should write an article on getting this too...

We had a lot of web design customers (about 200) but you can only work on so many projects at a time - we would typically have 30-40 in our pipeline, but only 10 or so would finish each month. And those projects aren't even in size - we'd normally have a couple big ones accounting for over half our income.

So even with 200 customers our income came mostly down to a handful of customers each month.

Oliver here (I wrote the article, and run Silktide).

It's early days for us, so I can't speak from years of experience, but so far there are marked differences for us:

1. We have a lot more customers. Before one or two of our web designer clients could hold us ransom over a big cheque - the sort of thing we needed to make payroll. Now we'd need a mass exodus of customers for the same to happen, and usually that would be because we screwed something up (i.e. it's fair).

2. Customers now have clearer expectations. Web design customers can expect all sort of things which they consider reasonable, and don't understand why they're not (e.g. supporting a website 5 years after you built it, changing their business fundamentally mid project, expecting 'as many designs as it takes' to get right etc). I know you can and should educate your customers, but essentially you're dissatisfying them. With products, generally people pay a fixed amount to use a thing for a time. If it doesn't work, we refund them. Simpler and happier all round.

I totally agree with your last point - if you can scale it pays better. So far, the jury is out on that one for us, but let's see where it goes...