I was recently joking with Martin Bean (a friend, fellow web designer and founder of MCB Studios) about a couple of silly web design enquiries I’ve received over the past few days. Between us, we realised, we had quite a number of such stories and quotes to share with you, here are 10 of the best (or worst!) ones.
#10 – “I have an idea for a website which could by the next eBay and I need a web design partner…”
I got this email when I was young and naive, so I agreed to meet this guy to discuss his plan over coffee in Central London after work one evening. It turns out his idea of “the next eBay” was to clone eBay itself! Indeed, he had acquired a rip-off domain name and wanted an identically functioning website, to be delivered within 6 weeks, and to be within his budget which was £900. I made my excuses and walked out.
Meet the new eBay, same as the old eBay.
#9 – “I want you to use this photo. I want it to be in landscape, but changed so that the height is bigger than the width”
You may presume here that this is just a case of a client not knowing the term ‘portrait’, but you’d be wrong. It was a photo of the building which the client in question operates from; the client wanted this photo stretched vertically so the building looked “taller and more corporate”. Bizarre I know, but this might have worked were there not trees in the foreground which made the whole effort look completely ridiculous. I tried in vain to convince the client to remove it, but the response I received boiled down to “I’m paying you to do a job, so do it as I tell you”. Fair enough.
Then they got all offended when I removed my “Designed by…” credit from the bottom of their site.
#8 – “Black on white is boring. How about hot pink on lime green? And can we make the logo spin? And Ariel is boring, let’s use Comic Sans.”
Of course this is not an actual quote and yes, it is a mild exaggeration, but the proportion of web design clients who fail to grasp the basics of good, sensible design is staggering. Just because you can make an element on the page animated doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can use a kooky font doesn’t mean you should.
I don’t hold it against a client for not having good design sense – that is my job. However, it does irritate me when my advice is ignored completely. One school of thought is that they’re paying me to do a job so I should do it exactly as they specify. Another school of thought is that it is a good designer’s job to convince the client against stupid design decisions. I think I lie somewhere in the middle – I’ll always make a case againse their ill-advised design choice, but if they’re still insistent, why waste more of my time?
#7 – “Use these photos, I got them from Google Images”
A big problem I encountered recently was with a client who provided a number of images for me to use on his site. I didn’t realise this, but he’d lifted them all from other websites, having done searches on Google Images. A few weeks after launching the site I received an angry email from a professional photographer who was accusing me of stealing his images. Clearly he was in the right (the image in question was part of a series he was presenting via his website) so I forwarded to the client his request to remove them. Soon the truth came out: every single one of the client’s images had been lifted from other sites, and he refused to remove them. Thankfully I include a liability disclaimer in my web design contracts which indemnifies me from claims that supplied images are copyright protected. In other words: if he gets caught, he’s got to deal with it. Last I heard, the photographer has initiated a copyright infringement claim against him, all because the client is stubborn.
#6 – “It sucks.”
Constructive criticism is a good thing. “It sucks” doesn’t fit that description.
This is a conversation I had with a client. I had just emailed them a link to a demo of a web page I’d made for them. The underlying page structure was identical, but I’d modified the CSS to change some colours and alter the size of some H1 and H2 tags. Nothing that major.
Client: I don’t like it.
Me: OK… what about it don’t you like?
Client: I don’t like any of it. It doesn’t work for me.
Me: Is it the colours, or…?
Client: No it’s ALL of it. You need to change this all completely.
Me: I only changed the colour scheme and the size of the headings. It’s otherwise the same as the last version.
Client: (pause) Well, now I don’t like it, change it back.
The client then agreed to use the original version.
#5 – “Why is your quote so expensive? My nephew can do [a 5 page website] for £50″
If he’s so good, just get him to do it. Even if site looks like this:
It doesn’t matter what quality your site is so long as you have one, right?
The quote above represents the attitude of too many small businesses acquiring their first website. A significant proportion of my clients already have existing clients designed by the boss’ son / the boss’ nephew / the office junior / the work experience kid /the boss himself using Publisher. In time, they realise that good web design is best left to the professionals.
#4 – “I paid for my domain name by credit card. My credit card billing address is in Oxford. So why doesn’t my site come up in Google when I type in ‘Oxford’?”
My response, in a nutshell, was: because it’s a one page website which hasn’t been indexed by Google, and the content did not refer to Oxford once.
I didn’t bother responding to the follow-up email, which began “Thanks for your response. Just a few follow-up questions” then asked about two or three dozen questions – “why am I not #1 in Google“, “why won’t anyone link to me“, “how do I get to #1 in Google“, etc. I followed the link at the bottom of their website to find their existing designers, who boast proudly to be SEO experts. I advised that this is a question for them, not me. There’s plenty of free information out there about SEO too, I’m not going to waste my time explaining it when some comprehensive answers to those questions have been answered in forums and blog posts many times over.
#3 – “I want to be number one in Google for the term ‘consultant’. My budget is £200.”
I just had to write back to this guy. What kind of consultant is he anyway? Turns out he was a life coach operating in the South-East of England, and didn’t even have a site yet. I briefly explained that it is useless to target the generic term ‘consultant’, far better to go for something like ‘London life coach’, and that the whole effort was useless when there wasn’t even a site in the first place. His response? “If I’m only going to show up for ‘London life coach’ then the cost should decrease proportionally. £25 should be enough.” No, it won’t.
#2 – “Just one more small change…”
Though it seems trivial to “change everything from red to orange“, you might have to change a PSD or PNG file, export all the slices, modify the stylesheet, modify some other details to complement the new colour… the list goes on. Only for the client to say “nah, I don’t like the orange. Make it red again“.
#1 – “We can’t afford to pay you but we’ll let you have a link back to your site.”
How generous. This is a particularly common request, some variations of which are “we won’t pay you but all our customers will see it” and “we’ll pay you once the website turns a profit“. A few months ago, a lot of people were finding my website by searching Google for “UK web design student” or similar, and my site was ranking highly. Therefore I was getting one or two of these requests per week. I now have a stock response to this:
Thank you for your enquiry. MB Web Design does not undertake any speculative work. I encourage you to read this article.
http://www.no-spec.com/articles/why-speculation-hurts/
Of course, they won’t write back because they’re cheapskates who want to exploit students to get a website on the cheap. This issue only seems to be getting worse – everyone with a computer and a copy of Dreamweaver can log onto sites like Gumtree and Craigslist and call themselves web designers*, freelancer sites like Elance allow prospective customers outsource their web design requirements to the lowest bidder. Both of these tend to be sources where price is proportional to talent. Craigslist in particular is often frequented by businesses seeking students to do their work for free as it will give them something to put in their portfolio.
* This is a generalisation of course, there are some good designers on these sites as well. They’re the ones who charge the most.
Conclusion
This post has been rather tongue-in-cheek but does highlight a fundamental problem of being a web designer. People hire you because you are the expert. It is, of course, unreasonable to expect your clients to be as savvy as you so patience and understanding are pre-requisites. However, they ran a little thin with the people mentioned above!
I’m sure in a couple of months I’ll have to update this with a few more “nightmare” clients and potential clients. Feel free to add a comment with your own experiences.
Tags: clients, ebay, internet, seo, web design
I think this could be the making of a good book
I went for a opening meeting with a client once which went great until the client said = “i don’t have a budget for this” followed by “I just want something cheap” – this was a company that supplied services / equipment to blue chip companies. Amazing!
I liked it the most
It’s good they didn’t say stretch the building and shrink the trees… or worst add 15 stories more
Hi there, I am new here. I am facing #01 now but due to is requested from friend, just take it easy
I am a web designer, a newbie
wish to learn from all of you here.
Any interesting web designer’s work I can find in UK? I found that Europe have lots of amazing Web Designer. I am from Malaysia.
Cheers !
Excellent article – Who said working in web design was easy!!
I laughed so hard… this was a great post. I’ve been a graphic designer for 30 years, and some things never change!! Except I’ve got some other ones that relate to you guys (web designers) How about:
1. How come the powder blue on my brochure doesn’t look the same as the powder blue on my web site? or… how come my web site colors are all different from this print-out?
2. Can you just make a web site out of my brochure? You have all the copy!!
3. To design my letterhead use the logo that’s on my web site… just download it. Or: how come all my images I supplied you with from my web site, print out so “pixelated”?
To this day your #5 is the one than incenses me the most! However, i think we are all guilty of that one if we reverse the roles a little… we are all expert at designing the interior of our homes, aren’t we? We pick our own wall colors, because “any monkey can do it”… right? Black walls in my teenagers’ room comes to mind… looks soooo coool!! Hahaha. If we didn’t have a bunch of idiot clients in this world, how would we know we are the “experts”. right? I love this business!
Good article. I agree, the designer sometimes has to design things that we designers even do not like, but the client is the client and if you want to make a deal…
I’ve had many of these myself and it’s reassuring to know customers are the same for everyone. Even in a hardware store 2 weeks ago, I heard the owner having number 5 given to him. If these people can get the jobs done so cheaplyby friends, why ask for professional quotes? Do they think we’ll offer to do it for half the price mentioned?
But the best was the guy who managed to do 10 and 1 at the same time. His ideas never got off the drawing board – at least not with me!
I can see all your point of views but what happens when you pay a designer lots of money because you want an individual site not based on all templates to discover that is all they have done. After a year, our basic shopfront isn’t finished and the site isn’t in anyway secure. And infact customers still can’t buy anything also they have used free software to design it on.
we went to a webdesigner because we are good photographers and not web designers and have totally wasted £5000. Have any of your forum writers any suggestions because this sort of company gives good designers a really bad name.
Very funny and real. Mostly all clients convence developer/designers through such arguments. Customers thinks that all can be done in one moment. Many customers sucks when they saw some future in irrelavant site and insisits on its inclusion in their site.
#3
Lol, these people always want cheap price for a good service, they never think that long tail would be a better choice…
He he, these are hilarious, there are more out there I promise you..
I can so relate to #7. Dealing with a client at the moment and he just doesn’t seem to get it! YAY I am so not alone! Thank you for the awesome read!
Comic Sans over a nice clean Arial….. get it all the time.
Great read.
I just went to a client this week, after non agreeing with his terribly low budget, he tried to convince me to offer him a discount in exchange for a link to my website after his site was finished, thanks to his link i would get alot more clients…right…
Awesome post!! #2 was my favourite – you get it all the time don’t you? people just dont realise that the smallest of things can mean the largest amount of work.
Great article, I did laugh at some of those comments. Probably becuase all website developers/designers here similiar comments all the time.
A website design is more than just assorting few good looking images with HTML pages. A professional website design process can influence ones’ web presence in a great deal and detail.
Yeah, I absolutely agree on this list! Of course, there are a lot more to add but it would get too long:) Congratulations for this wonderful post!
A lot of clients do not understand that a website is an asset. A lot of websites fail due to clients poor attitude at times, they are entering the world of web design and the rules are not the same.
I’ve dealt with loads of problem, that want the earth for next to nothing. More importantly they need to understand that a good website takes time to develop. They need to maintain and update the website often with good content.
The funniest thing, I’ve dealt with is somebody wanted to host a one page website on his home computer to save money on hosting fees. Hosting is dirt cheap now.
The amount of times I heard people my prices are too expensive is unreal. A majority of people would rather pay the kid down the road £50 for Front Page created website. I agree it is a poor attitude to take.
What the client should ask is “how much will it cost not to get it done professionally”.
A majority of small businesses don’t realise that is an extension of their business to increase and improve their sales. In web design it is likely you will get what you pay for.
Amazing post.
[...] One of my favorite posts on your blog is a list of the worst nightmare web design clients you have had and why, why it is hard to design in this new medium that people don’t understand or [...]
Ha! #1 is my favorite. People have such a warped perception of what a link is worth. Hilarious…
My favourite has to be #1. I get these emails all the time, I don’t mind charity but this these people just take the pi$$!
#1 is funny
[...] world of web than to learn from the mistakes of those that have made it big. I particularly liked Mathew Browne’s ‘Nightmare Web Design Clients’ – A post that resounded true with every pithy [...]
I recently had a few clients who were “concerened” that even though the site was submitted yesterday on Google they are not yet on listed. Why on earth!!!
What should I answer? Well I explained how it works. And then when I talked about google rank – Guess what I am glad I was paid beforehand. Otherwise you can guess “No site on google no pay” lol
Definately #1 is best.
We have heard that one many many times. No pay until results??? SEO is an on-going thing, and a lot of people dont seem to realise that. For some reason they think it shouldn’t be too expensive and if optimised should rank within days!
The points #5 and #7 are a real big problem that a designer often encounters. The article really deserves appreciation. It has in it all the practical problems regularly faced by designers and this proves how meticulously it has been written.Nice observation!!!
Great work. Looking to see some more interesting articles in near future.
This is a top list for the best ways how we can waste our precious an’ fruitful time, and the clients think this is 100% our job!!
I still get clients whom honestly beilive that no content should be below the fold, for the last time, people scroll, people scroll!!!
Well, the worst case was when a client delivered a PSD (if it can be called like that, because actually it was a puzzle of cutted images in one single photoshop document) and requested that I use the same fonts as in the PSD (emm…which fonts? on which PSD?).
Anyway some times they make my day, but other times they make my nervs..
Good luck with clients like that.
I think you’ve summed up the joys of being a web designer beautifully!
This is a great article, made my day!
Haha this is so completely true and it got funnier and funnier as the list progressed!
Nice one
I just spent 2 hours with a client. It is supposed to be a small website for the sale of a single product. I was charging her just 150$. After creating a template page I was working with her to create the text of each page together. I made the huge error of letting her use my personal laptop, and she took this opportunity not only to create promotional materials unrelated to the website but she also felt the need to explore my laptop’s contents, and start to comment on the ads I was running, accuse me of using her pdf files because the logo of the pdf file is the same (she thought that somehow the logo was specific to her pdf files, so ALL pdf files on my computer apparently were copies of her pdf file). I explained to her that pdf files all have the same icon and that does not mean that they have the same content.
However, she was too much for just that miserly 150$.
Moral of the story: keep clear boundaries, keep clear expectations, keep a good professional distance, don’t take on cheap clients.
This list makes me wanna change professions…..
I’ve got to add a couple of recents ones of my own…
1. Client: ”No one’s visitng my site”. Me: ”Well if you don’t give anyone your address they won’t know where to find you , will they?”. It’s unbelievable that these clients don’t have their website address on their letterheads or business cards or anywhere else and yet expect to have ebay’s traffic!
2. I had this one recently and had to give the Client a good telling off… He wanted some overly complex, 5 minute running flash intro with everything but the Kitchen sink in it … I explained the pros and cons, but he insisted. So I did it with preloader and all and he goes ”I don’t want that loading thing… I want the flash to play immediately the page loads”. All attempts to explain the role of the preloader and why the flash can not be loaded immediately failed. His reply ”How much does it cost to get the flash to play immediately?”. He finally agreed to the preloader after a couple of his friends and clients complained about his site not working…..
3. Another annoying one….Client: ”After you’ve built the site you’ll have to show me how I can maintain it…you know change background color, font, image positions etc”. Me: ”You’re asking me to teach you webdesigning? …uhhh… no problem…first of all though go buy your flash, photoshop, dreamweaver etc for like £2000 then we can start…….
lol! – I’ve encountered a vast majority of the nightmares mentioned throughout this thread. There’s been so many times when I’ve wanted to tell a client to p!ss off and do it themselves.
Most clients have absolutely no idea of the amount of time, knowledge and skill that is required to design a good website – and because of this they always think they’re being overcharged no matter how good the end result is.
Unless we design an entire site from scratch, dream up all the graphics, layout AND a vast majority of content for them, ensure it works perfectly accross all browsers, and SEO it to the top of google all for UNDER £500 theres very little thanks to be had… oh, and then of course they expect ongoing updates free for life… lol!
- I honestly think most of them believe all we’re doing is sitting in front of photoshop and a word processer for a few hours, thus we must all be grossly overpaid anyway. lol!
If only they knew…
[...] Nightmare web design clients. [...]
thee are good stories, but heres an interesting one, and id love to know peoples opinions.
2 years ago i designed a site for a “friend”. More like associate I had worked with who was a DIVA photographer, who claimed to be my friend only cause he thought hes be able to take advantage of me more.
he paid me 2/3 of what i asked, which I agreed to. I bought his domain with my own credit card, and added him to my server.
I designed the layout, and he never sent me content. I hounded him for weeks, then gave up. He didnt think his work was good enough. ( I had waited awhile to start the web site in the first place because he said he wasnt ready, then finally he was ready and wanted to meet up.)
7 months ago he contacted me to finish it. He called me, my phone was dead and I had no charger and had to email him back. He continued to verbally abuse me. I was on vacation as is and said Id call him when I was home and had the files. I told him to get his content together and send me a cd so I could have it ready, I sent him my address. He didnt do that either. I could tell he wanted to work on the layout more….
I called and left my new #, never heard from him.
Last night he sent me an email asking me to call him….. Im not even sure what I shoudl do as. 1. domain is expired 2. hes not on the server anymore 3. files weere done 3 versions of flash back 4. Im not into dealing with his abuse, and Im certainly not altering what was done, as it would be a pain to revisit at this point..
I hear your pain eveyone… All of this rings so many alarm bells.
I have one client right now that keeps saying:
“I FEEL THAT WE NEED TO BE NUMBER ONE IN GOOGLE”
(for a very common single word!)
If that weren’t outrageous enough, he hasn’t even paid for SEO and his web dev budget was literally peanuts, partically a favour, and what’s with the “we”???
Hey, “WE” need to be dragged kicking and screaming into reality…
But instead I count ot five and smile…
Like the last post said, if only they knew the blood sweat and tears behind the shiny results…
The above make me want to roll about laughing. They are so true!
I am a web designer/developer and I spent 4 years at university and a lot longer gaining experience in the industry before I started my own business. It was good until the recession hit, but now it seems everyone wants all-singing, all-dancing websites for nothing.
Take a look at peopleperhour.com for example. They get hundreds of people posting projects every day, and nearly all of them give a broad specification of a large project/eBay clone/mobile phone store etc. and they want it done for less than £250, oh and they want it done inside a week too.
Take my advice and avoid these type of bidding sites. They are a TOTAL waste of time. Even if you get a reply to a quote, the person usually tells you you’re too expensive, and ends up getting some spotty 14-year old to do it for £50 (yes I have had that happen – the site ended up looking TERRIBLE).
I even heard of one woman getting desperate on peopleperhour.com and bidding for a job that resulted in her being paid £5 an hour. You can get more for bar or waitressing work.
People, if you do this you are undermining the whole industry and all of our livelihoods. Just because people are cheap enough to ask for a £1000 website for £50 doesn’t mean you should do it.
The flip side of the coin is, clients, if you pay peanuts you WILL get monkeys!
Ha, just spotted the perfect example!
“Im looking for someone with xhtml, css, photoshop, javascript and possibly php 5 or asp experience to design/ redesign an affiliate mobile phone home page.
I will be useing the page design as a basis for the rebuild of an existing site, please see dream4mobiles.co.uk for an idea of the colour scheme required.
Please feel free to adapt the colour scheme as most importantantly the page should be easy on the eye but attention grabbing.
For assistance i can supply any images etc that may be required. ”
Budget £250, start date immediate.
^^ All very true!
Getting content from clients is a often one of the biggest nightmares.
Thesedays I won’t even consider beginning work on a site until ALL the content has been submitted, I’ve had way too many half finished projects end up on the back burner for literally months whilst waiting for a client to supply copy/images etc…. of course in the early stages they’re always like “we need it really quick, so how long will it take to build? how soon can you get it online…?” – now I just reply by asking them “how soon can you get me the content?” – needless to say the content generally appears in bits and pieces over the course of the following six months…
SEO can be just as much of a nightmare when the client has absolutely no idea of what’s involved…. there are so many aspects to take into account during the design process, and that’s before you do the more obvious titles, keyword density optimisations and meta etc. You’ve got the internal link structure, file names, folder structure among other things to take into account right from the word go…
…of course, the client sees the site when you’ve finished all the basics (to the spec they initially agreed upon) and decides they’d like to change the entire link structure….
“oh, yes, it’s all great, but there are just a few MINOR alterations we’d like to make to the navigation…” (haha! – it’s always MINOR isn’t it?)
“if you could just move this link above that one, change the name of that mainlink and remove this one from that section and have that over there, and we’d like this one replaced with that and have that sublink as a mainlink, and this link renamed to that one and those other ones replaced under the subheading of that one with the ones under in the previous main heading, and oh, can you put the content from that page on to this page instead and have those sublinks below that mainlink instead…” …blaa blaaa blaaa….ad nauseum…
..and all this when you know only too well that the way you did it in the first place was the most user friendly for both the search engines and potential customers…
Of course, after tactfully trying to explain the benifits of the current structure for both search engines & potential customers, and gently attempting to persued them to accept some slightly less drastic alterations to help satisfy their new (& utterly illogical) requests you eventually give in and do exactly what they want, afterall, your getting paid right? – it doesn’t really matter what they NEED, it’s what they WANT that counts… the customer is always right!!! yeah, right…
- then of course, a few days work later, they turn round and say “ah, erm… actually we’ve decided it would be better the way you had it before…”
oh, okay… fortunate I kept a backup then…
Back when I was at the Secretary of State’s office in RI the joke used to be that those who didn’t have any experience in design (I kind of include myself in that as I hate the minutia of CSS and the like) tend to use purple fonts and blink tags.
I love getting calls from India telling me they can build me a web site for £100. I just keep them talking and talking and talking…”oh really, yeah, ah ha, no honestly, you’re kidding….by the way, what do you know about my business?”
All hugely familiar! Have link, will tweet.
I designed five PSD designs for a client and he sent me a photo , I could not beleive what he sent me.
He used a white A4 sheet of paper and cut out images from the web and used glue / pritt stick and then took a photo with his phone and sent it to me with his idea for a design,
I told him to get lost and kept his deposit.
Best way to deal with these type of clients is the following
1 Give a detailed spec of whats included and whats not included.
2 Complete the process in two or three stages with sign off on each stage
3 If changes are required after sign off on each stage, charge for them
4 Charge for everything , a small change could take hours, but client does not know that.
5 If you feel you are going to take on a project from a nightmare client , you will know what I mean after the first few mins of talking to the client you know , this is gling to be tough — it will go on for months,, ask yourself is it worth it ?
I have been in the web design business since 1998 and I have been through every situation above, I have seen some very large projects completed very easy, and some very small projects turn into a nightmare.
Remember — Charge – $$$$$$$$$ otherwise a small project will turn into a monster that goes on for weeks or months
What about the clients that ask you to do something, then you give them your expert opinion and they reply with “well I don’t know a thing about designing and I’m no techno twit but it would seem that ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is a + b”, basically telling you that what you have to do should be very simple. I feel like getting smart and saying “well if its so simple, then why don’t you do it?”. Besides if you don’t know anything about designing how do you know something is simple to do?
There are so many stories on here that have me laughing in tears because I haven’t found one yet that I haven’t gone through.
People are a nightmare at times…….
Oh and the “I’m looking for a hookup”. In other words, they want to “barter” services. NAAAAAAAAh been there, done that, won’t do it again…….
Love it! We’ve all been there. It’s amazing how in the beginning you take on every possible client but with experience you can quickly spot who might turn out to be a huge problem. Saves so much time and aggravation.