I’ve dealt with my fair share of “difficult” clients. I’ve also seen a number of my fellow designers post up on their blogs about some of their worst and most frustrating moments. Personally, I’ve tried hard not to let them get to me. I’m not judging, but I never wanted to be at the point were I threw up an angry entry, condemning an ex-client. Sure, I’ve been frustrated. Walked away from Mail.app. Even felt downright despondent, but I’ve always pushed through, ultimately settling on the notion that my clients are paying my bills. Sure some of them have butchered my designs with rather “questionable” recommendations, but it’s their website. I’ve never had anything too extreme (nothing that made me want to take my name off of it) and can usually pick out quite accurately who is going to be hard nosed in our initial meeting. Truth be told, I tend to take contracts from clients who leave the majority of the design in my hands. But I’ve recently come across more and more clients that are really interested in the aggressive promotion of their websites.

SEO (I’m really starting to hate that acronym) now permeates much of the mainstream. I’ve even had clients without any knowledge of web design approach me on the use specific metadata. I tell them, “your site’s got it.” I design all my websites to be search engine optimized. Metadata is just but one facet. Including search engine friendly URLs, titles, tags, and the proper use of headings and content layout is just good design, at least to me. Frankly, I don’t know any serious designer that forgoes these small details. Moreover, I don’t think it’s all that 007. I’m open with my clients and always try to teach the receptive ones about my craft. I figure it’s the equivalent of a mechanic taking the time to explain the inner workings of fuel injection, or what the master cylinder does.

Bu every now and then, I get a client who wants to aggressively market their site. They think they can beat the search engines, like no one else has tried. They’ve read up on linkbacks and google rankings, and are determined to hurdle their competition. But their website is light. Information is scattered and loose. Write-ups are less than concise and generally speaking, somewhat redundant. Even the greatest web designer can do so much with poor content. At the end of the day, you can only shift around divs and paste css for so long before the visitor figures out there isn’t really much to see. To these people I strongly urge they abandon the guerilla marketing tactics and just promote conscientious and strong material.

I’d have to say that “page waterfalling” is the rookie mistake. Most new to the net think more pages are better, deciding to section out everything they can on their site. Honestly, I would rather visit a site with 3 pages if that’s all the content they have. Adding a page with a sentence just doesn’t do it for me—it never has. I socratically tell them to concentrate on tightening up their content. To really think about the message they want to send and how they want to send it.

Now I often edit text. After all, I do have a post-secondary education and have written more reports and papers than I care to remember. I’ve also paid an exorbitant amount of money for that degree on my wall, so I’m bloody well going to put my teachings to work. But sometimes, the content is just not there. It’s like writing an 8 page paper on a topic that ended on the 5th page. I never felt like I was fooling my professor and I never feel like my client is going to fool their visitors.

So rather than turn this entry into a rant (it’s not, I swear), I would just like to caution those that desire a website or wish to market their product or service online: Think about it. Write a paper. Complete with headings and sub-headings. Then turn that into your web designer. Trust me, they will be overjoyed. It will provide an invaluable template to work with and ensure that you don’t market air.