The Four Laws of Making a Website*

  1. If you hire the best person in the world to build you something custom, it might be expensive, but it’ll be perfect for you.
  2. If you use a proven off-the-shelf product, it might not do everything you want, but it’ll do what it does extremely well because of economies of scale in development and testing.
  3. If you try to split the difference, you’ll spend more than you expect to get something that isn’t perfect for you and doesn’t work very well.
  4. If you do it yourself and you want to do it well, you won’t be doing anything else for longer than you think.

*Similar rules apply to making houses, surfboards, contracts, videos, and pretty much anything else.


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