“All of us who are working for ourselves have to make decisions about the type of business we are building and the clients that fit into that.” This is so true! I usually see this as a win-win situation:

-It’s great when I get to work on a project I like with a client I’m in accord with.
-If there’s a project I don’t end up working on, it means that the client (or project) and I don’t fit together, which makes not working on it okay.

Still, there are some projects I want to work on and clients I’d love to work with… but can’t, if I want to pay the bills. I guess we all have to find the comfortable intersection between doing what we love and getting paid for it.

As for dealing with new clients, I also ask questions about the project as a first step. Some clients never get around to answering them, which immediately identifies the clients I would be incompatible with. If they can’t be bothered to answer questions about their business goals, how (and why) would I help them achieve these goals?

Sorry, I’m starting to get off-tangent here. Thanks for your reply to my comment. Great post!

@Corinne

Thank you for bringing up mood boards! They’re a great idea. I’m fascinated with real-life scrapbooks — I’ve been meaning to fill a scrapbook with interior design photos and color samples for my dream home. So it’s weird I never thought about doing something similar for web design.

I was going to say something about committees and gradients, but perhaps that’s a topic for another day. ;)

I think one way to iron out what the client wants before designing the whole site is to send the client a mood board. I recently read an article by Kevin Flahaut about mood boards and thought it’d be a great addition to my process. He even provides a PSD template that is organized into different sections like color palette, typography choices, and sample imagery. With mood boards I honestly think you can avoid too many revision requests by covering the basics of the layout like color, imagery (patterns, textures and photography), an typography.

Once the interface is designed, the client may see something that she doesn’t like. Maybe she wants this bit of info moved to another page or that button doesn’t look right or her husband doesn’t like the gradients! Anyway, my point is we can’t predict what the client will ask of us designers but we can at least try to cover as much of what the client (and the client’s husband or committee) wants and needs in the steps before designing the interface.

Well, I think this has to be my longest comment (I don’t comment often) so I’ll end here. Excellent post, by the way, because it really got me thinking about the web designer and client relationship.

I do get inquiries ffrom time to time who are strictly price shoppers, but rarely end up with these people as clients.

How do you deal with new clients who email you: “I need a website for my business. How much?”

My first response is that in order to quote them accurately I need to know more about the project, I follow up with some standard questions about the size of the site, the features needed, etc. Some people never even respond to that, those who do I usually get a sense pretty quick from what they send to me if they are seriously interested in hiring a designer or if they just want the cheapest and fastest available. If its the later I reply with a “ballpark” range for them on what something like the project they have described would cost them and let them know I am happy to send a more narrowed quote if they’re interested.

Also, I don’t think there is anything wrong with simply asking what their budget is! A “tight budget” could be $100, it could be $3000, it’s all relative and you never know who you are a talking to. Starting out, sometimes I got people who had a smaller budget, but it wasn’t so low that I was willing to turn it away and some of these became valued clients who have grown with me.

I believe that listening and research are invaluable to any web design project — and in an ideal world, every project would have these important steps. But there are some clients who see web design as more of a product than a process. I think this is one of the reasons why designers usually do the X designs, Y revisions method. How do you deal with new clients who email you: “I need a website for my business. How much?”

Being more of a programmer myself I adopt a kind of similar approach in terms of planning. I meet with the client and allow them to speak their mind regarding their project and I note down key areas of the meeting. I tend to try re-assure the client that the meeting isn’t a life threatening thing, and this loosens up the client greatly in sharing their focal point of what their project is all about.

After I get the main elements, I then research on how I would for one put these elements as a whole together, and how the client would like them to operate. Obviously, researching competitive websites firstly before proceeding onto this step.

I mainly use the second meeting at the end of the planning stage to show the client, the concept of how I plan to develop the project, the design work of how things will look, and the justifications for these decisions. This will then allow the client to make any further changes before signing off.

During development of the project, I use a iteration type technique, by breaking my development of specific elements down into blocks, once a block finishes and is ready to be tested, I get the client to test and see how they like it. By doing this, I show the client exactly how their project is building up, and with adding them into the cycle, they feel wanted and have a sense of feeling they are contributing. Once all blocks are developed and tested, the client at the end gets an overall of the complete project tested before finishing.

Once the client has tested, I get an evaluation from the client which provides me with his feedback of how I have done the project. And this again, serves as a last minute change before finalising the finished product with the client.

Well, that’s how I do things, might need to take a few pointers from Liz though ha ha! Amazing article!

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