It never ceases to amaze me when I hear horror stories from both clients and other website service providers, about the interactions with each other. For the first few months after starting Anubis Marketing, I’d hear story after story and couldn’t believe my ears.

And then, it happened. I got my first “bad client”. In that particular case, it was a man who would have me spend an hour on the phone with him, moving borders and sidebar widths by pixels. You read that right. “One teeeeny pixel to the right,” he’d say. Well, pixels are pixels and there’s no such thing as a “teeeeny”, tiny, or gigantic pixel, but I’d move it and he’d say, “No, put it back. Make the width of the box one teeeeny pixel bigger.”

After over 15 hours of these phone call based adjustments, I reminded him that he’d gone way over his base rate, and that I was going to have to send him a bill for anything further. You’d think I’d demanded the deed to his house! Why is it that people seem to forget that you have to PAY for work? That my time is just as valuable as theirs? He threatened to sue me. I explained that we would just have to agree to part ways at this point, and subsequently, he got a “near perfect” website, and I was out a couple thousand dollars.

This kind of thing is quite the learning experience, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened since. In fact, it’s happened again just recently. What it HAS taught me, however, is that I needed a way to a) get a few things off my chest and b) explain to people (mostly new clients) what is and is not expected of both the client and the web service agency.

So without further ado, here is part one:

How to be a good web design client

• Understand that your old site design may be outdated, and know why this is important to come to terms with. Whether or not you realize it, part of why you want a new website design is because you don’t like your old one for some reason! It’s either outdated and looks like it was built in the 90s, or it’s not serving you the purpose it’s meant to, because the design and navigation is WRONG. A good web designer knows what works, and what doesn’t. For what it’s worth, animated .gifs DO NOT work. Once you take the steps to hire a new designer, have faith in their knowledge and experience, or don’t hire them in the first place until you DO have faith.
• Give your designer examples. Show them sites you like, and tell them why, or understand that they’re going to go with whatever they want and you need to love it. If you don’t tell them that you absolutely hate the color blue, and they do your site entirely in shades of blue, you need to know that you’re going to frustrate the heck out of them by telling them after it’s all done that you hate blue. You’re tacking on more time that they’ll need to spend, sometimes hours, and they’re not going to get paid for it because they offer unlimited revisions. Do NOT leave it up to your designer and then nitpick. Either you have a vision or you don’t, and you need to make that very clear UP FRONT.
• Changing web design platforms, hosting companies, servers, or software WILL cause a little downtime of one kind or another. While the search engines crawl your new site, your old pages may still show up in the search engines for a while. This isn’t to say that the new ones won’t as well, but the old ones will. A redirect or a custom 404 page will help visitors find what they’re looking for, and this shouldn’t be seen as a big deal. Everything WILL resolve itself properly - no, not overnight, but it will. This isn’t your designer’s fault, it’s the nature of the search engines and internet/server propagation.
• If you have a major issue with a design, wait for the designer to ask your thoughts before you flip out, and make sure you detail your issues COMPLETELY upon first response. It’s entirely possible that a designer could be working on something at the time you see it. It’s also easier for a designer to work off a list of issues, rather than one at a time. Don’t call them up and say, “That headline is too big, and I don’t like the color.” And then after they fix it, don’t call them up and say, “Now it’s too small, and I like the old color better.” Instead, send them an email with a detailed list of ALL the things you like/don’t like about the design. Then let them work on that list and resubmit to you for approval before you contact them again. Most designers allow for unlimited revisions, but not on a 24 hour a day basis.
• This brings me to probably the most important: Respect your designer’s schedule. Contrary to what you’d like to believe, your project is NOT the only one on their table. Designers very often switch from project to project, and they work on a very different format than most people are used to. It’s artistic, and sometimes requires them to “leave it” and come back to it later to see if THEY see anything they’re not happy with. Designers also aren’t supposed to be available to you 24 hours a day. Calling their homes or their cell phones is considered rude behavior. Now, if there’s a TRUE emergency, like the site’s crashed, and your designer has given you a cell phone number, and explicitly stated to you that it’s okay for you to call it in the event of an emergency like that, that’s fine. But if you’re not pleased with the background color, send it in an email and let it go.

  Even during regular working hours, email is the best way to communicate with a designer, because of the fact that they could very likely be in the middle of another client project and a phone call from you forces them to stop what they’re doing and open up programs and windows to deal with your problem. It’s not only frustrating, it’s quite possibly the number one cause of angry designers. If a designer asks you to email them with your issues, understand that they’re not blowing you off, they’re trying to get their work done so they can fix your problem when they can give it 100% of their attention.

There’s likely more, and I’d love to hear from other web designers the client contact issues that frustrate them and make projects more difficult than they need to be.

Coming up in Part Two: How to be a good SEO client.

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