How to Send Your Web Designer to Hell?

Author Thomas Arie on December 5th, 2009

When I have someone who wanted to ask our service and it’s related to web design (blog, sites, etc), we don’t just start the work right away. I usually spend my times and steal client’s time to have some discussion about the project. Usually, I ask few things:

What kind of website you want to have, and what about priority/goal you want to get?
How do you want to work on your site? Do you do it yourself or you have someone to do it?
Tell us what you want to have for your future website.

Usually, I have feedback from them. By this, I can work faster and more efficiently. In most cases, clients are happy with this kind of initial discussions. As the designer, we have to work together with clients. And, not only that. We also have to deliver our ideas and (sometime) arguments. For example, I had a client that already had a concept. I told our client about what we think about the concept. I gave another insights. This made our clients think.

Another example, I proposed an idea of having part of the website to be placed in a certain area. I give my arguments why it came up with the idea. The client thought that it was make sense and she didn’t think about it before.

I tried to offer a solution. I tried to flood them with some alternatives — with arguments of course. But, in some cases they really stick with their ideas because they [thought] knew with all this design stuff. Sometime, I said OK. Once, I had an arguments on this issue. Our client and I didn’t go with a same idea. And since I had time, I let our client to go with his design ideas.

Did you know what happened after that?

His clients complained because the website was confusing. They event tell our client that they were not comfortable being on the website. His clients event tell him how to make the website better, and I already told him before about this. And what his clients told was something that I had anticipated. In short: the website didn’t work. Lesson learned. Oh, I left my client. I know, I shouldn’t have done that. But…

Anyway, the situation I got is perfectly illustrated using following genius comics. What happened was not exactly like this, but the situation was similar to this. This is from The Oatmeal: How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell.