Put an End to Client Abuse of Web Designers & Developers

Business
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They do! You can explain to them that it’s dummy text. This is one of the smaller problems I have encountered with web design projects. Normally greater issues involve trying to avoid freebies and sticking to contracts, even if some have selective reading.

Needless to say, the restaurant owner now understands the implications of social media and has relieved the employee from Twitter duty.

Again, we can offer some training and support in using social media, but as this involves more time this needs to be charged. I am not too sure clients would be happy to be charged for social media training if they originally came to you for a website, but I am 100% confident they’d gladly take the training for free. This is where the problem lies. Clients don’t fully understand what they need, but they always understand about payment, and in many cases they’d argue payment where possible, not because they don’t have the money, but mainly due to power of the money. Money in many respects is power, and when they owe you money they have the power.

The legal path is always a painful path, and to my knowledge contracts are used as a form to blackmail to convince clients to act according to what they signed.

We need to explain to the clients that they’d need this training to help them with their social media. You can refer them to a specialised social media company you trust, but when additional money is involved people seam to at odds with you. In many cases they’d probably challenge your judgement because of the money involved. If they are not your clients they’d probably go elsewhere looking for somebody on their wavelength. Kind of silly if you think about it

It’s about getting paid for what you do, as well as respecting others and treating others like you’d want to be treated. I truly feel companies are heartless, and achieving such a co-operation is hard amongst company employees who try to use dissatisfaction as a way to get you to work off quote, which raises another point.

Some clients are just made to exploit others, these kind of clients always have complaints about others and are never happy with anything. This is why you’d need to probably spot problem clients before you’d fall prey to them. Those kind of clients never win. I like to think it’s God’s little way of giving people their fair dose of karma :slight_smile:

This article could really be explored.

PS: not all clients are bad, but it’s always the problamatic ones that shape the way we do things

Hope this helps

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This is where having a blog ought to be a no-brainer. I’m curious; blogging wasn’t mainstream yet when I shut down my business. Do most of you have a blog you keep updated and refer clients and prospects to?

In the pre-blogging days, I had a number of articles that would address these questions and provide some of the free training you mentioned. It was enough information to help the client decide if he was going to attempt it himself or if he needed my help. Nor did I mind spending a hour or so with a loyal client discussing things he was concerned about or struggling with. Most of these conversations ended with them giving me another project. Then there’s the offer of “buy me lunch and pick my brain for an hour.” So long as it wasn’t McDonalds, a free meal seemed a fair exchange. And some of those brain-pickers turned into clients.

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It was enough information to help the client decide if he was going to attempt it himself or if he needed my help.

What if they used this as an excuse to consume more of your time, and kept asking for advice on the blog posts. In the end you’d have spent so much time you’d might have well as done it for them. Where there is room for misunderstandings there is room for clients to exploit your good nature.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I believe the good should be rewarded and the bad should be punished. With this in mind I would gladly spend the time for a good client who appreciates my time, and I’d even say a thing of two about improving their sites performance for free (imagine that!). However, when somebody uses manipulation, avoids payment and gets you to work off quote following up with intimidating emails demanding free work (cc’ing God knows who in the company), then i am fairly confident you’d rather respect yourself and let that client go.

In the end we were to blame for our mistreatment as we did not have proper procedure in place and were in-fact too good with the client. The problem is that we let our selves be taken advantage of, this fueled a lack of appreciation towards you as they’ve exploited your good nature. This is where we need to be a little heartless ourselves and act more like a business and less like friends, once you’ve established that they are good clients you can loosen up a little and be a little lenient to them as you truly value their business.

I do have a blog which is being worked on now in order to help my search engine optimization, it’s all good fun. :slight_smile: It was not done for the clients, but more for the website, in the end I will put some tutorials for clients too.

Hope this helps and I am looking forward to the article, and I’ve enjoyed giving you my perspective :slight_smile:

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I think it’s important be a good judge of character. Their was a woman I met at a networking meeting who was interested in hiring me, until she found out the price. For the next month or so, at each meeting she’d ask me questions. I didn’t mind; she was a nice lady, and that’s the point of networking meetings … to network. One day, she walked up to me and said she’d like to hire me. I never got the sense that she’d been trying to exploit my good nature. She just needed to have those conversations to convince herself to pay my price. If I’d sensed otherwise, I wouldn’t have been so accommodating.

It’s like life in general. I’ve done favors for people who were genuinely in need and grateful for the help. I’ve refused to do favors for people when I get a sense that they’re a user looking to exploit my good nature.

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I’d like to thank everyone for your input. The article is up. Feel free to post a comment.

Stop Client Abuse of Web Designers Now!

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From the point of view of a customer that is actually in the process of renovating his website with the help of a professional after ten years, I might be able to give a different perspective.

Remember that most customers have little knowledge of the web site design and implementation process.

Why should the customer not take price into consideration? The reason why it is so prevalent is because your fellow web designers are competing on price. Sure, you can try to compete on quality, but the bulk of the market is not there.

Aren’t you guys working from a detailed contract? I hired my web developer in elance, and I made sure that everything was spelled out.

Why would it be disrespectful for me to load up your proposal into a graphic program, and do the changes myself? I think that avoids miscommunication. I learned that was best after my guy misinterpreted a couple of suggestions.

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Here’s the link to the second article:

[h=1][SIZE=3]Stop the Abuse! 7 Steps to a Well-Trained Client[/SIZE][/h]

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Hi! Thanks a lot for the tips! I guess that they will be usefull one day for me as well! Go on sharing with the community!

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As a client, I have to say you could not have picked a worse title. I thought your first part would have gotten this approach out of your system, but nope.