I totally agree with Jack and Brent on the issue of not courting small
business sites. My experience has been that clients who have $300 to spend
all want and expect the same level of finish on their sites as those who
have ten times that to spend. They will say, "oh, I only need one page."
Then, when you sort out what they really need, it turns into a full-blown
web site with extensive client hand-holding.
We started talking with the clients about our current project in mid-May.
The project should wrap up today. Since mid-May I have been deluged with
emails with questions about their project. Until I demanded an end to it,
they even had me on their inner-office list so that I would be cc'd on all
their little jokes they passed around the office. Basically, even though
their budget was equivalent to only about two weeks salary (if we were
salaried), they've expected a level of participation from us similar to
that of full time employees for the last 10-12 weeks. Even a simple
suggestion like that of switching to faster host has required a half dozen
emails. Yesterday I worked on HTML for a simple form, and found that I had
four different e-mails listing copy for the same form, all from different
people, and all different.
This client is not an exception. Rather, it is typical of what we've come
to expect in client relationships. Dave and I, as has anyone who's worked
in an ad agency or design studio environment, are good at organizing and
directing the flow of copy and materials. Art-directing typesetting jobs
was a great way to learn to organize our thoughts, because every mistake or
every style change used to add an additional $50-$150 to the cost of a
typesetting job. With rare exception, clients don't have these
organizational skills. Their methods of presenting essential input amount
to total chaos. I spend a good portion of every work day just trying to get
copy input, photos, approvals, etc. from clients. What's worse, they've
learned that changes to computer-based jobs are easy, so they are even less
organized and more demanding than they used to be. The actual design and
production portion of our jobs takes up a trivial percentage of our time.
In fact, most any job that we could knock out in a week or two of solid
work manages to get dragged out to two or three months, largely because of
client disorganization. I don't think I could keep my head above water if
we had more than two or three projects going on at any given time.
Another issue is concerns my ethics. I know in my heart that I could not
produce a powerful marketing solution for a client for $300, and I wouldn't
want to do anything less than an effective job. The Web is full of enough
crap without my taking money to add more.
Suz
Suzanne Stephens, Stephens Design; Ashland, Oregon
541-552-1192 http://www.KickassDesign.com/
CyberCircus Grand Prize Winners http://www.thecybercircus.com/
Web Page Design for Designers Design Resources: http://www.wpdfd.com/wpdres.htm
Clip Art: http://www.freeimages.com/artists/
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