Guide to Being a Good Client 101
May 7, 05:54 PM by Alicia Ramirez | Technorati Tags: process,clients,client,designer. relationship | Category: hiring
First-time web design clients often make similar mistakes. This article is for newbie clients that are in the process of having their first site created, because being a good client will yield better results, and help you get out the most out of your designer.
Understand the process
Every designer has their own way of doing things, a unique process, but most will go through the following general steps:
- Information gathering: during this process your designer will ask you as many questions as he/she can to get to know your business and assess what needs to be done. It’s important that you tell the designer as much as you can about what you are looking for. Once this first phase ends, you should have established clear goals, project scope (what the site will have in it), and a clear understanding of where the project will go. Just remember that if you don’t know what you want (in clear, concrete terms), you won’t get it. We designer are awesome people, but we can’t read minds.
- Graphic design: here’s where the fun begins. Your designer will make some mockups (graphic representations of what the site will look like once built, but it’s only a picture) to choose from. It is crucial that you make clear comments about them. Be specific about what you like, don’t like, and what needs to be changed. Saying things like “make it cooler”, won’t help much. And remember that once you approve of a design, that’s it. Very few designers will welcome changes beyond that point. Why? Read on.
- Coding: this is when the designer will take that static mockup, chop it up and use code to bring it to life. The reason why you shouldn’t make significant design changes at this point is because changing, for example, the color of a background could end up requiring changing multiple graphics and even having to re-code the entire site. What may seem like a small change to you could imply hours of extra work for your designer.
- Hand-off: if you were a good client, and made all your changes at appropriate times, this will be a breeze. Changing your mind at the end of the project about things like section names, colors, copy (text), etc. will only ensure your project will go on indefinitely and most designers will charge extra for such things. Once the project is handed off, most designer will give you a window of a couple of months to make adjustments, fix bugs, etc. so it’s important you take the time to make sure everything is perfect before your time expires.
Communication
A lot of the communication you’ll have with your designer will be making revisions to text, images, site structure, etc. Make sure that’s what you really want before asking for it. Flip flopping is the worst offense to your designer. Their time is valuable (you’ll be paying for it).
Some clients use email as a weapon. Firing emails like a machine gun will only generate confusion, and frustration. If you are making revisions to the latest version of the site, make a list of all the changes you’d like made, and send it once you are sure that’s all you want done. This will ensure that no item is missed, or forgotten.
Trust your designer
Your designer will have more experience than you with what is popular, current, and appealing in web design (at least, they should be). Here’s a list of things no good designer should let you get away with:
- Flash intro pages: they just scream “Let’s party like it’s 1998!” They are useless, and people will just get annoyed. They came to your site to do something specific, not to see purposeless animations.
- Animated gifs: they are just bad. See what I mean:
- Beveled and embossed items: again, they went out of fashion a decade ago:
You should be able to make suggestions regarding your site’s design, but listen to what your designer tells you.
Content
Unless you are paying the designer to also do the content, this will be your responsibility. I’ve seen projects that should have taken a couple of months extend to almost a year because the client didn’t have the content. Don’t ask for features and web pages for which you don’t have content.
Finally, once you have the content, proof read it a couple of times. We are all human, so a couple of typos and errors are expected, but you’ll just be wasting your designer’s time if you keep asking for multiple copy changes. You want your designer to spend his/her time coding and making a cool site for you, not adding and removing commas all day.
Conclusion
And if the above is not enough incentive to be a good client, keep in mind that well-established designers can afford to reject problematic clients. We can smell them a mile away!