Frustrating!

mcskillz

Member
Just really on to vent and hopefully share some experiences with others!

I've a new client, starting up business this year, who has decided they want to spend money on their 'brand' but not really on a website. The result is going to be a hideous home made website, with a nice logo.

Quite difficult to showcase your work in this kinda scenario.

Anyone been in a similar boat?!
 
At the end of the day you'll probably spend (waste) more time trying to convince someone who dead set on doing their own home made website than the jobs actually worth...

It's a simple case of sometimes you just can't convince the client and you have to move on to a PAYING customer, remember your time trying to convince someone isn't getting you any money if the client still says no :)

All you can do is raise your concerns and if they still don't agree, you leave them to it.

We all have pride in our work and want it shown in our best light but unfortunately real life sometimes has to come first and that means paying the bills or compromising to hit deadlines etc.
 
Funnily enough I have a client like that at the moment... *sigh*

Some times I wonder how they managed to make it this far in the business world. My client likes to dictate horrible designs to me, then after a few stages he will ask me what I honestly think *he must know it looks terrible....) and I have to tell him... then it's back to the drawing board. Well that's what I did at first, now I just tell him it looks fine, because otherwise I'm not going to get paid. To agree with and build on Levi's point, before I started having clients I used to think about how great it was going to be to create perfect logos, do amazing work and get paid for it! Now I have come to realise that actually, it's a very difficult game to play some times and if you don't handle situations correctly in an efficient manner then you will quickly become frustrated (case in point) and be out of pocket.

In your situation I would personally follow Greg's advice. Find out why he isn't particularly fussed about his website and then tailor your response based on his answer. If, for example, he simply doesn't think his website needs to look good, I would use a comparative analogy and explain to him that websites are more than just a sales platform, it's an extension of their company and more importantly their virtual shop front. If you walked into a physical shop and they had post it notes for price tags, the shop was a mess, all the shelves and aisles were horribly mis aligned, floor tiles were missing etc etc you simply wouldn't want to shop there, it's the same for websites.

As for showcasing your work, just make your own backgrounds to put the logo on, I like to make a background collage including smaller parts of the logo in the background and then some larger sections in the foreground with the logo in the centre. It looks professional and you don't have to worry about people worrying about the quality. You can see that image on my (still unfinished...) website: www.ladesigns.co.uk it's the huge box on the left.
 
Hey folks - thanks for the thoughts, though I know exactly how to handle the situation - I'm more just interested to see how many of us are coming up against the same odds at times :)
 
Yeah, well, I've done a lot of research into similar issues and watched plenty of talks from professionals and apparently a lot of the time it's our fault, haha. For not setting the right boundaries and expectations at the beginning of the relationship and a plethora of other things, it makes sense when you hear other people talking about these issues!

Obviously there will always be the exceptions...!
 
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