From the life of an ambassador: From leading an agency to everything creative and back with ambassador Maxim Krušina

How did you get to be a solidpixels ambassador and what do you see as the key advantage of solidpixels?

I've been making websites since the 90s. Since then I've been thinking, I can't do websites, it's a very complicated thing, I've hired someone to do it over and over again. But when it kept getting delayed over and over again, and the contractors were giving me the "my pet died" excuse, I figured I'd just sit down and do it myself. Gradually, I've managed smaller projects on my own, we've even developed a few generations of administration systems ourselves, we've really gone through everything, but it was terribly time consuming. We didn't want to depend on external coders and we also wanted to save time, so we switched to Wordpress. At the beginning it seemed like a great solution, because the website was built so fast on it. However, when dealing with the details afterwards, it takes almost more time than if you build the site the traditional way. You build the site and it looks like it's done. But then the client comes in and says they want YouTube. So you search for YouTube plugins, find out there are about 150 of them, pick one, install it, only for some other plugin to stop working because they're incompatible with each other. So you fix it, but something else breaks. Then the client accidentally clicks on the Wordpress update, so it completely crashes the whole thing. This process is very hard to price, because you can't rely on the tool and you don't know what's around the corner.

Then I got to solidpixels by accident when I was doing a quick website for a friend. I clicked it in one day and found it suspicious how smoothly it went. I figured that this is the first time that we can make a website for projects up to about two hundred thousand crowns without any problems. For that kind of money, it's not worth doing it the traditional way at all, which is why it's the perfect solution for exactly these smaller to medium-sized projects. And besides, I see a huge strength in the possibility to assure the client that if we have a fight or stop working together over time, it doesn't matter, because he has full access and can manage everything himself in peace and simplicity. At the same time, solidpixels is brilliantly designed and it's very hard to do ugly things with it. We've actually built almost 30 websites on solidpixels. It's a reliable tool for me, thanks to which I can make sites quickly, flexibly, I can estimate pretty accurately how much time we'll spend on it because I know that nothing will surprise me along the way, and thanks to all this I know that we can make good money on it.

The moment a client comes in wanting a website, solidpixels is always the first option. There are of course exceptions when something extremely specific is needed, but those are really the minority.

What is the most common myth about the web/working with the web among your clients?

Clients sometimes imagine that creating something is terribly easy. I call this type of demands "the justs." I've made a price list of such "justs" - just the site, just the logo, just the content, etc. I once went to a lady who wanted something about communicators and she said she had fifty grand for it. When I went to see her, she showed me a WhatsApp saying they wanted something like that. So I just laughed and showed her the actual value of the app which was in tens of billions of dollars. I said, I'm sure we'll program it, it just might take a little more money. It's the same thing for specific items in web development.

Can you share with us your latest favorite project?

We recently did the identity and website for the Spectaculare festival, which is a project that is close to my heart because it's a wonderful cultural event that was also created by the legendary Josef Sedlon, who has influenced me a lot in my life. For this project, despite strict internal rules, I even managed to convince the client that the website would not run on the internal system of the Akropolis Palace, where the festival takes place. I think I convinced them mainly by sending them the finished website at 3pm on Tuesday, when we had a meeting about it at 6pm on Monday.

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