Note to clients: 7 reasons your web agency (secretly) hate you
- You’ve no idea where the real work is happening on your website
While your developer is trying to integrate your website with some cockamamy third party payment provider you’ve insisted on choosing and get it to handle the ridiculous 88Mb product images you keep on uploading, you’re constantly phoning them to complain about a photograph of your offices that is ‘a bit dingy’ or a spelling mistake on the ‘About Us’ page (that no-one will ever read anyway).
- You’ve no idea what your website is for
You’ve been charged with getting the company website sorted out. You didn’t provide a brief beyond ‘it should look a bit like this site I saw’ or what kind of content you wanted the site to contain. Now you can say with some certainty that you’re ‘not quite happy’ with the design, but have no clear pointer of why that is or how you want it to change.
- You suddenly involve someone else in the design decision
Design is subjective. Everyone’s opinion varies. All the more reason not to sign it off and then pass it round the office in order to solicit feedback off 4 people who don’t understand the internet and have the fine aesthetic sensibilities of an otter. All you’re doing is giving them a chance to show how vocal and ‘influential’ they are by slagging off what has been done. It’s a one way ticket to a pissed-off designer building you a dogshit website on purpose.
- You think that you shouldn’t pay a penny more than your original quote when you move the goalposts to, say, Bolivia
You’ve had a quote for a 15 page brochureware website with pretty graphics and a contact form. Despite forcing the company to go through three different iterations of the design (see point 3), thus eating into their profit margin, you then decide at the last minute that the site was supposed to be a content-managed ecommerce site and you’re insistent that this was what you agreed at your first meeting in March 2001. It wasn’t.
- You phone every five minutes to recite the latest chapter you’ve read from “Web Development for Dummies” down the phone
It can be quite involved building a website and the fewer the distractions the easier and quicker it will get done. Your developer has already heard of CSS/Ajax/Whatever and your rambling request to ensure it gets included is doing nothing to speed up the process of getting your website out the door.
- You want ‘bug fixes’ three years after the site went live
While your web company might not be perfect, there’s a sign-off process that guarantees certain levels of quality. Checking the site yourself before that final stage payment might pick up some nooks and crannies that goe missed and if you find anything over the first month or two, a reasonable company will be happy to fix them. Phoning up out of the blue to claim the site ‘isn’t working’ 2 years later will do nothing to maintain your relationship with them.
- You haven’t done any advertising yet still blame your designers for the lack of sales
Hey! Guess what happens if you open a shop in the middle of nowhere, selling products you can get anywhere else and don’t even put a business card in the chipshop window. Nobody buys anything from you! Now go try and get a refund from your shopfitters. Good fucking luck! Your website isn’t just going to sit there spontaneously generating leads out of the ether. You haven’t got a marketing budget? Don’t bother with a website!
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OMG number 5, totally. The guy who sends a dissertation-length itemised list of questions about SEO and then calls half an hour later to discuss them. Then emails again to clarify things he’s just thought of whilst reading his book on online marketing and asks ridiculous questions that don’t make any sense.
Also, the person who kept referring to “Analystics” really pissed me off.
Talking like you have all this experience, and no doubt you do! They say ignorance is bliss, well as a webdesigner it can be a tedious task working with those that know little. If only we could direct all our customers to this site;-)