Client Speak

Posted by Anshul on October 4th, 2006.

Anshul has posted 1 articles.

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Just to let everyone know, this is my first post on fadtastic and it feels great to contribute at the same place where people like Phil Renaud write. Now to the article.

Lots of good and bad rants have been written about what designers hate about clients. Has any designer ever cared to wonder why the client reacted in a particular way and what they could have done to prevent this reaction from the client. I have been a client several times and my personal experiences have ranged from excellent to just plain s***t. The biggest problem that I face almost every time I try to contact a designer is the email response time. I go to a designer’s site, look at their work, and then if I like, contact them. This is where the pain starts. Repeatedly I have had to wait for like 2 weeks to get a response. This is irritating. I know designers are busy, but come on how can anyone stay away from answering their email for 2 weeks. And to top it all, the email response would be something along the lines of “I am sorry but I am booked till (insert specific month). What do I do now? Look for another designer. Another slightly less irritating problem is the portfolio page. Normally every designer has a portfolio page so that a client can look through their past projects and see them live. I do not know why it happens with me, but whenever I click on a link to check the live version of a site, it normally doesn’t load. Why can’t the designer make sure that everything on the portfolio page works. Though I might add in that for designers who have like 100 completed projects might be forgiven.

These are my 2 biggest problems with designers. What problems do you face?

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I think that the main issue here is that designers love the digital world. Most clients I’ve had in the past aren’t web savvy so don’t like (or can’t manage) using email and other web technologies.

Accessibility is an issue for our websites - why not make it an issue for yourself towards your clients. Let them interact with you how they want to. Many designers fail to understand that clients may not grasp the web and its technologuies.

A good designer will liaise with clients in the real world regularly and not rely solely on email communication.

Andrew Faulkner
October 4th, 2006
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Well, waiting for response is really irritating. But non-working pages in portfolio… Well, if the designer is not a developer who coded the site and [s]he is not hosting the site then it might happen that the link does not work. I as a designer had few occasions when the client changed the site without my or developer’s help - added new advertisments to some place where they shoudn’t be making the site invalid. Should I remove link to that site from my portfolio?

Victoria Pavlova
October 4th, 2006
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Important read (when dealing with customers)

Johan
October 4th, 2006
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I as a designer had few occasions when the client changed the site

This is really hard to manage. Keeping a regular check on clients’ sites is difficult and time-consuming. I guess asking them to notify you of any changes would be useful. Some designers put local versions on their own site to combat this but I dislike doing this.

Andrew Faulkner
October 4th, 2006
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I would agree with your points, but can also see the other side.

- IF a client is too busy - would you rather them take on more work or be honest and decline your request? If it already took them that long to respond in the first place - then maybe it is BEST to look for another designer. Don’t haggle with just one - shop around.

- IF a client wants to put up a portfolio, then they need to MAKE SURE the sites are a live, working example of their work. If they dont want to continually check - don’t put it on the portfolio page. I share the same frustration, and while I know it is work to check the destination links - if you don’t want to put the time into it, don’t post the links - it only makes you look bad.

Just some thoughts…

Nate K
October 4th, 2006
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[…] fadtastic “Client Speak” […]

» Kundenbeziehungen — cne _LOG Archiv
October 4th, 2006
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I guess one suggestion would be to run a link checker on your site regularly.

Andrew Faulkner
October 4th, 2006
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I would feel weird asking a client to notify me if they needed to make changes, just because it’s their site after handoff, unless they are paying for maintenance.

J Phill
October 4th, 2006
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The trouble is that because a designer is good at designing it doesn’t mean he is good at running a business. I have found this time and time again in my career. Business skills are key you making money and that is why most successful design agencies are headed up by a business mind not a creative mind.

Matt Davies
October 4th, 2006
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Unfortunately, it’s in the nature of creative types to take on more work than we can handle. As a result, responding to email and updating our own websites get neglected (among other things that we deem “low priority”). Time management requires linear thinking, whereas design often requires non-linear thinking. (That’s a sweeping generalization, I know, but I hope you get the point). So the qualities that make us good designers often make us lousy at time management.

Marcello
October 4th, 2006
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I used to be a freelancer for quite some time and I never realized all the potentially annoying things I did with my clients. That’s until I started hiring other freelancers & IT service providers.

I agree with Matt Davies - the fact that you are an excellent designer is not enough to obtain and keep loyal clients. There are many talented designers out there. A good designer should also learn about customer service (and they didn’t teach us that stuff in college). There are so many important things to someone hiring a designer besides quality design - like trust, reliability, good communication, “can do” attitude, and the general sense that the designer is trying to work with the client and help their business grow - not just make another portfolio-worthy website.

As for broken links - it does look unprofessional! One idea is to provide for each project links both to the live site and to a few screenshots, and perhaps include a little “report broken link” button. Makes people see you try to efficiently stay on top of things. I personally never had to deal with that because in my portfolio I only keep “the latest and the greatest” of my work - so I know if those are up or not. I have found that many people who browse portfolios get overwhelmed by too many screenshots and links.

Ilina S.
October 5th, 2006
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Ooops, I meant “get overwhelmed by too many portfolio pieces” in my last sentence.

Ilina S.
October 5th, 2006
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Excellent first post! Welcome to fadtastic, Anshul!

Phil Renaud
October 5th, 2006
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A portfolio should be nothing more than showcases with screenshots, plus an explanation about code, the project, etc.

About dealing with clients, you cannot foresee that all things you need from the client come smoothly on time. You only have to see that you show your client that you work on the project, and gradually all things shape up and you get there. If a client has unreasonable requests, tell the client since you are the expert. But dont be a wisenose, it is a give and take situation but keep the role of you the expert and the client asking all sorts of stuff.

Johan
October 5th, 2006
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Sounds like you’ve dealt with some pretty unprofessional designers. Waiting two weeks for an email response is totally unacceptable in my opinion and as for out of date portfolio pages, well once again as far as I’m concerned that is another bad sign. It’s not that hard to keep a website up to date.