5 Reasons the Web Design Client isn’t always right

Personally, I feel that there’s no reason to stick to any policy or concept dogmatically, but there’s one concept out there in business that’s always really rubbed me the wrong way, and that’s the old barb about the customer always being right.

The actual concept being conveyed by this missive is that the customer can always vote with their dollars, and buy elsewhere. This is very true, and very much worth keeping in mind. If your policies, products, or postures are out of step with the marketplace, you won’t be in business much longer.

But as we’ve transitioned into being a consumer-driven culture, some people have taken these words and twisted them into some kind of childish mantra, wherein they need to be given whatever they want, just because they want it. Alex Kjerulf gives us 5 reasons we shouldn’t be so quick to service the needs of ultra-demanding customers on positivesharing.com.

Now, in web design, of course, there are even more reasons to stick to our guns as designers and developers:

1.) The Customer doesn’t always understand the technology involved.

Your client may be taken with Flash animations. Or he may think that his META tags should include 85 terms his competitors use that aren’t in his or her pages. You need to be prepared to discuss not only why these are bad ideas, but also defend your ground so that this client doesn’t return to demand accountability from you for an underperforming website after overriding your recommendations.

Your customer’s job is to run this website as a business after you’ve developed it for him. Your job is to develop that site to put it on the firmest technological foundation you can. There’s often an inherent dichotomy here between your client’s having hired your expertise (expertise they may or may not have themselves) and your client operating the finished product for a profit. If you cannot communicate effectively the potential flaws in your client’s vision, you’re doing both the client and yourself a disservice.

2.) The Customer wants everything for nothing, failing to realize that everything costs something

This class of customer has checked freelancer sites, has heard foggy notions of outsourcing to foriegn countries, but hasn’t yet been burned by a teenager in some remote country taking his or her coin, delivering a half-functional or poorly-functional website, and disappearing. I’ve gotten a very large percentage of my own business by being able to describe why this approach is nearly certain to fail:

• Foriegn designers may not understand the cultural values that you need in your own site.
• Foreign designers offer no recourse to an unsatisfied customer.
• Yes, a teenager from the block can often build websites. The question is, does he build professional websites?

And this is not to pick on overseas designers, nor the local web-savvy teenagers. I’m just saying: We designers are in business. We can’t make a windfall on currency-exchange alone when dealing domestically. And we’re not putting our first notches in our gun handles either. We know what we have to make to earn our keep, meet our payrolls, and feed our families.

The other corollary to this are the customers that feel they can take an open source software package off the shelf, put their logo on it while duplicating the look and feel of another popular website, and immediately make millions of dollars. Designers and Developers need to be prepared to articulate the work involved, for the client as well as for the developer to whom they’re outsourcing the design/development work, that goes into building a successful web presence.

3.) Can you duplicate this?

Yes, we already discussed this client, but we’re going to go right back to that trough, because it deserves deeper examination. This one is one I have personally dealt with many times, and when I read Sam Ryan’s excellent “10 Absolute NO’s for Freelancers” I felt vindicated.

Or, as Seth Godin would put it, what makes those first-movers remarkable is their having made some attractive innovation first. Putting those same innovations to another website will not inherently result in a website as successful as the one that’s being copied. And if copying another website’s layout, features, or functionality will not make your client remarkable in the eyes of their customers, it’s your responsibility to communicate that.

There’s a time to follow trends, and a time to buck them. The key’s knowing when to say when, and resisting the urge to do what everyone else is doing, just because everyone else is doing it.

4.) If you build it, they may — or may not — come.

Amazingly, there are people out there that are still clamoring to duplicate the mistakes of the past. Just building a website is not an immediate path to millions or billions.

(If it were, I’d have bought Microsoft by now, where my first act would have been killing Vista in favor of a customized flavor of Linux! But I digress.)

As much as some folks would like to pretend it’s still 1998, and throw buzzwords around and slogans like “we’ll put (x product) at their fingertips”, it simply no longer works like that in the real world. You need to be prepared to discuss the longer-term marketing strategies that your client will either need to pursue themselves, or engage you further in, to achieve success.

5.) The 4 P’s haven’t evaporated.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks still don’t understand the fundamental nature of how people operate online. Nor has the internet changed the nature of people themselves. Your client’s business plan still needs to address product, place, promotion, and price. These 4 P’s of marketing still remain the fundamental basis through which a business can increase it’s reach with customers.

• Product: This one’s usually easy; the client wants to sell a good or service online.
• Place: In this scenario, we’re talking online. However, it’s great if a client has strategies for integrating their website into an offline strategy as well.
• Promotion and Price: As we’ve already discussed, the era of e-commerce as a novelty is OVER. And people can, and do, comparison shop. The website needs to effectively communicate the differences that make it’s good or service remarkable, and why the price is warranted, just as in any other field or marketing effort.

As designers and developers, our own time is best spent developing. It’s ultimately our client’s jobs to have undertaken adequate market research and to properly articulate the benefits of their own product or service. However, in my experience, this is rarely the case.

Therefore, just as chance favors the prepared mind, so too does the marketplace favor the prepared designer. Designers need to be both aware of their client’s likely shortcomings, and be prepared to address them without necessarily being prompted.

What’s at stake? It’s obviously far better to have a stream of referral revenue coming in from pleased and successful clients than it is to have to constantly scramble for the work of clients with whom, or from whom, you share no current relationship or affinity.

So, throw the old thinking out the window. Your customers will NOT always be right, and as a website designer, your job is to effectively communicate and compensate for those areas in which they are not. Doing this successfully can bring a windfall in referral income, and doing it not can result in being unfairly maligned for the failures your clients insisted on.

Don’t let your clients walk off the cliff. Talk them off, and put them on the right path. They’ll thank you for it.

About the Author: Brandon Dawson is President of Athena Internet, an Ohio-based Website Developer specializing in the Joomla CMS, and is author of Packt Publishing’s Joomla! Cash, a primer on adapting Joomla! to business uses.