Have you ever said: “Everything on the internet should be free and by golly I am going to find free solutions”?
If you hunt around the internet for a solution to the problem at hand, good for you for being industrious enough to help yourself.
If you spend more than an hour searching and trying free solutions knowing full well that there are paid solutions that come with support, you have free solutions syndrome.
This morning I caught a bad case of free solutions syndrome. This is what happened:
I’m working on a new website for an artist and through our conversation we thought it would be great to use a slider on the home page.
There’s a saying: “If you want to do something in WordPress, there is probably a plugin”.
So off to the plugin depository I go. Stubborn as I am I downloaded darn near every one and tested them to see if they would do, or have the option to do, what I wanted it to do.
In the back of my mine I knew of a site that sells sliders for – like $8 bucks – yes, you heard me right, $8 bucks.
The $8 Slider.
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I know that their are many GOOD free solutions on the internet. I for one have found many. But the trouble with a lot of free solutions is that you don’t really know what you’re getting, and more often than not; well, you get what you pay for.
I learnt a big lesson this morning, which was to value my time. For amount of time it would have taken if I just went for the paid solution, I could have had the work done and gone off to the studio for the rest of day.
It seems to me that there is a mentality that says “everything on the internet should be free”. Agree or Disagree?
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Right Verna; I paid dearly with my time on this one, which is exactly my point. Where do you draw the line with paying with your time vs investing a few bucks?
Interesting question, that. I don’t believe anything on the internet is actually free. I guess it depends what you think of as payment…. I pay with my time and also my focus, because it is so easy to get distracted and sometimes lost!
There is a tonne of great free solutions and content on the internet – but the time needed to find, discern and edit the gold from the garbage is often what makes paid solutions so valuable.
The gathering, organizing and presentation of information in an easy to use package is worth paying for (as is paying for expertise and years of experience).
It’s the difference between having a ‘how-to’ manual on your shelf vs. gathering up individual pages scattered around your neighbourhood.
Well said Lezley. One can’t discount the value of expertise and years of experience.
Learning from our mistakes and the time spent to accumulate expertise is gold. While a lot of expertise is offered for free, paying a nominal fee is totally worth it when your time can be better spent else where.