sandwichesandapples

I’d laugh more at Clients From Hell but it strikes a little too close to home.

$1,000 is very expensive, you know. We only want a simple website with our current contents, and contact form as well. And don’t forget about CMS features. We want to add or edit content on our own. And the picture gallery, we want something that stunning and animated. The header should be animated as well. And our logo seems too old, can you design new logo for our company? But the best price we can offer is $300, and we think that’s more than enough

Here’s a great article on information architecture from A List Apart. I’d like to comment more on it but I’ve waited almost two months to post it. So I’ll just let it speak for itself.

My firm took a quick-turnaround job yesterday to transform an existing graphic into an HTML email template. This required a bit of graphic design and a bit of old-school HTML 3. Our CEO asked one of the UI team to stay late and knock it out. I was here for part of the time that she worked on it.

At some point in the evening, the client’s designer came by and literally sat behind our designer while she tweaked his original image and created the HTML for an email newsletter program that we do not use ourselves, ConstantContact. While I was here, everything looked hunky-dory, albeit it… ridiculously slow. I don’t know why it took as long as it did. Evidently, they were in the office til nearly midnight having started around 6 or 7.

Today, the client decided we screwed something up. I haven’t been able to catch the whole story because it seems no one actually knows the whole story. But emails weren’t sent correctly or something. As I understand it, the client bitched and sent her designer over to pace around outside our office.

So what do you do?

Well, we jumped. We’ve got two people working on the problem. The client’s designer calls the client to report on us. The client calls our project manager. The project manager tells our designer what to do. The client calls our CEO.

What I think we should do:
Tell them to go fuck themselves and remove all our code and design from the web. There’s no way they saved it for themselves.

Okay, maybe we shouldn’t say “fuck,” but I think it’s a losing proposition. We had a designer in the office work 5 hours of overtime to get this project out the door yesterday. She had the client’s representative sitting behind her approving every single click she made. And the client has a problem today? Fine, take your business elsewhere. This could not be worth it. I heard the total price was $1000. So how far do we go to recoup just a bit of our losses?

The downside? Our rep? I don’t think so. Most likely, everyone who knows this client knows she’s a pain in the ass so how could her negative feedback hurt us? If her contacts don’t know her as a pain in the ass, it’s probably because they themselves are pains in the ass and we don’t want them as clients anyway.

The plus side of kicking the client out the door is that it will engender a whole lot of good will from our designer who is exhausted and annoyed. Also, it’ll save all the man hours now being spent by three other people in the company. And ideally, it would set a standard of abuse that we’re willing to endure for a small paycheck. Such a standard is incredibly important because it establishes in the company’s mind a baseline for other client dealings. “No” is an incredibly powerful word. Once you say it and draw the line, you really empower yourself to work with a better class of clients.

I just had a client meeting where we discussed blogging, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, et cetera — all things to increase their web presence — when I suddenly was able to define exactly what it is that I’ve heard from so many clients:

They want website activity without being active themselves.

I had one client in particular who was very concerned about increasing their website’s traffic, their stickiness, their activity. I made one simple suggestion: blog. “Oh, we don’t have the time for that.”

You can see the paradox.

I know many companies are hiring bloggers and social media experts and I think these are moves in the right direction but I wonder if they’re not corporatizing something that maybe shouldn’t be that corporate. Websites are easy to make look good and function well. But so often we complicate websites (usually at the client’s behest) and make them harder for clients to understand. So clients don’t get it that blogging is totally easy to do, helps their site stay active, improves their search engine ranking, and creates stickiness.

I really can’t believe that I’m writing this in the year 2008 but when you type in all caps, you look like a rude child. Perhaps you’re trying to be emphatic but the result is a dizzying mess akin to shouting. The reason for typing in upper and lowercase is not simply for the sake of netiquette but because that’s the best visual way for letters to be understood as words.

I just had a client send me an email typed in all caps and it’s like trying to decipher a baby’s screams. When every word — and in fact, every letter — of every word has the same weight, I can’t focus on the meaning of the email.

ALL CAPS = FAIL

It’s retro day here in my office. First, I was amused by the <MARQUEE> tag making an appearance in some code we outsourced to India. Take that, Web 2.0! Then, I got to update static HTML files that each contained the hard-coded navigation to the site. Granted, the site was “old” but so are server side include files.

I know this is likely all Greek to you, but I’m venting a little bit. I really don’t know why clients whose sites are this old haven’t been upsold into a new model. I wonder if this is a consequence of the “old” model of web firms designing, hosting, maintaining, et cetera: the firm can’t upsell the client on a new design because the client would rather pay the lesser service fee to have the old site maintained.

I suppose one solution is to raise fees for service to out-dated websites. In fact, at first blush, that seems like an ideal solution. You pick a date and tell your clients that after that date your fees double to service deprecated code. Then you offer then cheaper rates if they pay the one-time upgrade fee.

Another solution is something that I keep meaning to write more about: breaking the old model of web firm as host, maintainer and designer. I’ll have to get to that later.

I was in a meeting yesterday where my boss told a potential client our hourly rate and added the hyperbole, “we’ll wash your car for an hour if you want us to but it’ll be an expensive car wash.”

For the record, I won’t wash your car for an hour. At least not in the capacity of web designer. I know that was just salesmanship exaggeration and fun but I just don’t think I could ever even say that to a client. I’m good at my job. I’m better when my job is interesting to me.

Not to say that washing cars isn’t interesting. In fact, washing cars is much more interesting to me than adding site content via hard-coded HTML (rather than through a flexible CMS like a civilized person). But I don’t like the sales theory that the firm (or the designer) is simply for hire. I’ve taken too many dull gigs just for the payday and it’s never been worth it. It’s a waste of everyone’s time when the client is just hiring a valet and the designer doesn’t get to do what he’s good at.