It broke my heart to do it his way, but the customer is always right.

I Have
-done an ebay ripoff for 800 (they complained about the price!)
-made stupid designs recommended by clients
-heard “my so and so can do it for cheaper”
-done sooo many “small” changes
-gotten so many offers to be in a partnership (I do everything, they get half the income)
-received offers for a link-back in return for making a site… why not just make myself a site and do the link-back

Your writing reminds me a lot of this book by a guy named aristo ambrose – How to Start a Web Design Business:The Things They Won’t Tell You!

They all seem to be companies with old skool bosses; the sort who’ve held out for the past 15 years and has finally decided to ask his PA to “get us a website but I don’t want to spend too much on it, I don’t know how all that stuff works so *you* deal with it!”

The result is an email or phonecall from someone who’s none too happy with having been burdened with this task who essentially says, “we haven’t bothered looking at your site as we have a long list of designers to get through, so just give us your lowest quote for an undefined website project and please don’t waste our time asking about project parameters, deliverables or even if we have our own hosting or not.”

Oh, and they also demand to be number one on Google for a very broad keyword but don’t seem interested in a brief explanation as to how Google actually works.

Another personal bugbear is when I get emails from people say, “I already own a template so….”
So what? Even working on your Monster template can take a few hours work, easy, not to mention that you’ll need to consider your own stock photos, logo design and other factors, but always expect a double-digit quote, max.

When you see/hear the words, “I already have a template” run a mile. People who say that don’t put any value on you, the designer, they’re frustrated by the fact that they’re unable to do the whole thing themselves, for free, and simply want to hire the cheapest HTML Monkey they can find.

In both cases, when the people you’re dealing with don’t actually see the value in having a properly designed website and just want one for the sake of it, as cheaply as possible, it’s never going to develop into a fruitful business relationship.

Obviously it’s your job, as a designer, to do your utmost to convince clients of the value of your skills and services and then to provide that value to them, but you can’t win ‘em all, as they say. And usually, I’ve found, the truly unwinnable ones are almost always immediately apparent during first contact.

So if you get that wary feeling first thing day one, always trust that gut feeling, it saves a lot of headaches and invoice reminders later on.

Repeat for every possible location and measure throughout the site…
After a couple of weeks of this, I fired the client.

a client requesting me to remove the “iStockPhoto” watermark that’s usually displayed on stock photos

I can totally relate to some of these, especially #2, some clients just don’t understand how much work has to be done at times for the little changes…and here’s another kicker I drafted a few designs for a website, the client approved one of them so I started work on it the next day, I had the first page up and running, show the client and what she said left me baffled: “maybe the colours from the first website the other designer did would look better” so she approved a design then after I made the first page of the website, grafting in all the html and css she wants to go back to an older/more amateur colour scheme by a “designer” who used a template to make the first website.

Thanks for letting me take out my frustration