BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

It should be a common knowledge already that the less the client pays for your service, the more of your time he/she consumes. Usually this happens because they try to save every penny and argue about minor things that naturally should have been let go. However, by concentrating on such minor issues, the client totally misses the major stuff that needs his/her attention.

For example, let’s take an online store. By being a royal pain in any place you can imagine the client takes about a week to decide between the two offered ways of presenting a single product on per line in the store (a decision of two hours at most, really!). Then we, thinking of a better way to promote the product the client sells, offer an addition to the store that (by our calculations) should increase product exposure by large volume. It’s a trendy perk, not many stores have it, so it would naturally rise confidence in web site. Client impolitely declines, since it will be more expensive and push us to complete the project. Which we, of course, did.

On the closure meeting that lasts two hours instead of 40 minutes client politely listens to the presentation on how to use their store (almost without taking any notes), after which goes on about how he wants us to change the design since “we never discussed that there would be only one item per line”. That is - after they have agreed on the draft, confirmed (no less then two times) that no additional changes are necessary and that web site will look exactly like on the picture. And after the week-long heated discussion on how to present single item per line in a best way. They delay the last installment. We offer that they keep the last installment and go with another web design studio, since they are dissatisfied with the job we did (although we did everything according to the specs, offered additional functionality and features, accommodated their shoe-string budget and so on).

Now, I am not writing this to bash clients - they are in their right to make mistakes. They probably just need to learn how to take responsibility for them, but that’s not my concern. The more clients come in our way the more I see a trend where people who pay more money for essentially same product (i.e. web site - in any of its form) take less of your time by managing important parts of their web sites and leaving technicalities to us. After all - that’s exactly what they are paying us for. People who can afford to spend more money value their time and our time more then those, who spend less. In different terms - they know how to delegate responsibilities because this makes them more money. This knowledge, as far as I understand, comes after certain level of acquired business experience. What’s cause and what’s effect - knowledge or money - I think is obvious.

So the next time I see this client (hopefully it won’t be as painful as it was last time) I will give them couple of links to a good articles on delegating responsibilities. No matter how much hard time our clients give me, I still believe in educating our customers. Can’t vouch for this particular case, but the general trend says that it helps.

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    Fellow web designers. Please hear me! During recent active browsing, where I got to see many pages that I wouldn’t usually come across all my web browsing senses were offended. Below is the humble pray to the designers and their clients who may have, unintentionally, forgot about the visitors.

• When you design those fabulous web pages, please test them on more then just Internet Explorer. Firefox and Safari must also be included in testing. Not because I said so, but because a lot of people use them. For most of us, the “other people” Firefox IS the main browser of choice. And by the way, the major IE version is already 7, not 6.
• When you create pop-up windows, please make sure I can resize them. If I cannot see half the window, especially with the buttons “Buy” and “Order” - you are loosing revenue. Aside from the general idea that pop-ups are bad, they are twice as annoying if I cannot see what you are trying to show me.
• When you create flash-based web sites, please make sure the new window you are trying to open won’t be resized with the rest of the windows I already have opened. Not only it is EXTREMELY annoying, it is also look like very bad manners.
• When you open that flash web site in yet another new window, please put an explanation - why do you need three separate windows to open single flash animation. Maybe when you read that explanation to yourself the stupidity of the moment will hit you back. Wish you could survive the blow.

Best of luck! Oh, and don’t forget to test your luck in three major browsers.

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“An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design…“

read original | digg story

Great article if you are involved in web design and if you read it thoroughly. I must admit - in our web design studio we sometimes get carried away with using free fonts and free images. However, the problem (at least sometimes) isn’t our laziness or not knowing any better.

Most problem arise with such “bad behavior” are tied to our inability to persuade clients not to use widespread imagery. At times it gets all but funny - “it worked for them, it will naturally work for us“. Naturally, it won’t. We’re getting better at explaining things to our clients, but we’re not flawless yet.

This, however, poses another opportunity to be better then competition. Alright, we’ll use that image you’ve seen a dozen times, but we’ll try to do it the best we can. So that the next time you see it on someone else’s web site, you would recall our client, not that other web site. Use that image to create a point of origin.

Creativity doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be creative.

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