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clients are crazy

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	From what I'm seeing, it looks like a lot of small business people come at their business's web site as if it were a vanity site. They want some kind of stupid animation on it, a personal bio about them, links to their favorite sites, screen captures of pub files of their favorite magazine ads that they've done. And as a pro, you know that most clients won't be looking at about 50% of the crap they put on there. So I guess it's how you approach it. If you come at it from a marketing point of view, then you can tell your client that you are designing a site that, according to the numbers, is most likely to represent his/her business appropriately to the clients who are viewing it, and that using animated GIFs of happy animals and curser tracers and backgrounds on every page will tend to look sophomoric, not professional. Not to mention, all the stuff that the client asks for that I cannot do because it's not possible on the web or because it would amount to stealing someone else's images and ideas (I have lost count of how many times I've had to use the phrase "intellectual property" during this project). Or you can design it exactly how he/she wants it, and let the client wonder why the web site is not generating any business. Which is your job, making a site that the client asks for, or making a site that will give the client what he wants, which is more business? Good question (probably a good question for the client). Now, my new issue with this site is that it is the site that never ends. We made the final product, the client asked us to redo half the pages and add a lot of new content (he was supposed to give us all of the content up front). We are now past the deadline, and the client still wants updates. Sure, we can charge him an hourly rate for the updates, but he may not mind paying $65 for updates and additions. And really, we'd like to move on. So how do you tell the client "no really, this is it. We are done. This is what you paid for, and it is done"? How do you cut it off? Or am I being whiney; should I just take the $65 an hour and make his stupid updates, even if I am still doing this in 3 months? As for that "the customer is always right" fossil, I once read this about that statement: if a customer walks in to McDonald's and orders lobster, he is, in theory, wrong. McDonald's doesn't serve lobster. So how can the customer always be right if the customer is free to make ridiculous demands? This is how; the true meaning of that phrase is not that your job is to be slave to the customer's whim. The true meaning places the server in a more active position, as the person whose job it is to MAKE the customer right. "Hey, we don't have lobster here, but I can get you a burger and some pretty tasty fries..." "Hey, I can design your site like that if you want, but here's what I recommend you do if you want to make money off of this site..." [This message has been edited by Odd Cat (edited 10-30-2002).] Loading...
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