Co-existing With a Web Designer

I found this on Craiglist and figured that it was alternately hilarious and thought-provoking. I wish I knew who the original author was so that I could give credit where it is due.

Enjoy!

I’ve been providing web services on Craigslist for a few months now. I’ve noticed a pattern both in ads posted to the list and in my personal experience with those who post upon the list in search for web authors. In an effort to help avoid some of the problems that may arise in a web authoring/web client relationship originating with Craigslist, I thought I’d share with you the following observations. I begin with a list of things you can do to cause your web author to refuse to take your telephone calls, refuse to answer your emails and refuse to offer you continuing service:

Mistake Number	Description
(1)	Your biggest mistake is to assume that the web author you made contact with through Craigslist is an inexperienced fool aspiring to be your slave. While this belief is pervasive amongst the many sociopaths who own small businesses, it is far from reality. Many of us offering our services as web authors are also software engineers, computer scientists, programmers, and engineers with degrees and experience. Yes, some of us have decided to try to go it on our own and start a web authoring business. We need some clients for our portfolio. However, this does not imply that we are poor, stupid, naive and addicted to abuse. You just may be getting a great deal not because of our shortcomings but because we simply wish to create a list of successes before advertising in a more profitable venue. If you assume that you can abuse or exploit us, we might just lift a middle finger. After all, your $120.00 means nothing to us and our time is valuable.
(2)	Your whining costs us time. Time is money. Therefore, if you whine endlessly in the hope of squeezing extra work out of us for free, you not only irritate us, you waste our money. Since we’ve probably offered you a rock bottom price for our work, any additional overhead will cause us to lose money. If we were only interested in providing charity work, we would not be helping you, the small business man. No, like most altruistic people, we’d offer our free help to someone who is not well off and spoiled. For example, we might help the homeless or victims of domestic violence, but don’t expect us to treat a high paid self employed photographer as if he were in need of charity.
(3)	Threatening us is a big mistake. Sure, you can find someone else to enter a dysfunctional relationship with, but they will raise their middle finger to you as soon as you begin acting once again like a prick. We know this. You may think, “well, I squeezed 70% of the work on my website out of one guy for nearly nothing, now I’ll just hand over the other 30% of the work to some other sucker.” You could think that, but the joke would be on you. You see, you’ve just lost all of the expertise someone had in your website. If it was authored with a sophisticated tool, you may have lost the needed source code as well. This means that you are starting over again from scratch because the next web author will need to start from ZERO, not from 70% complete. Your technical ignorance combined with your arrogance has just sent you back to step one, whether you realize it or not.
(4)	Don’t assume that we are un-networked individuals. We just might warn others about you.
(5)	If you were truly rich, you’d be contracting with a major professional imaging firm, not unknown individuals on Craigslist. If you expect the kind of results you would obtain by hiring a first rate, expensive, marketing firm, you are fooling yourself. Individuals cannot provide all of the services a team can provide. This is why we charge you much less than a large firm. If nothing short of the work of a high priced firm with an army of specialists will satisfy you, don’t waste our time by advertising here. Go out and PAY for that kind of service (you cheap bastard).
(6)	Telephone us constantly. It lets us know that you have no life, no friends, and not enough work to keep you busy. We’ll respond by no longer answering your calls. After all, if even your mother won’t talk to you 24/7, an unknown on Craigslist won’t either.
(7)	If you live in the delusional world of those who believe that the entire planet is sitting at home or the office staring at YOUR website, you may wish to seek professional psychological help. The service that you provide and advertise on your website may be the center of your world, but it is not the center of everyone else’s world. In fact, for that small percentage of the population that is obsesses with your field of service, only a tiny percentage of of them will ever come upon your website (and, may never come upon your website if you piss us off). At any moment in time the number of people viewing your website is probably somewhere very close to ZERO. Therefore, if something on your website bothers you, don’t call us in a panic and demand that we drop every other client we have and attend to your obsession immediately. We can get to you during our next free time slice. If that isn’t good enough for you, medication is available.
(8)	Unless your website sells products to online customers that you will never meet, your website is not the cornerstone of your business. Its effect on your bottom line, especially in the short term, is nearly NIL. If you think that “just as soon as my website is exactly as I want it, money will be pouring in,” you are completely ignorant of the reality of the web. For your business, the web is really just one more venue for advertising. If most of your customers are local, the local yellow pages will have a much greater impact on your bottom line than the web. Your desperation to get online and be the flashiest website in your field, if it leads to abusing your web author, is pathological and needs to be addressed by a well qualified psychologist.

With that said, now let us address how to keep your web author.

How To Keep Your Web Author

Good Move Number	Description
(1)	Web development is an evolutionary process. A web site is put up. You pay for that service and then review it. Small changes may be made free of cost provided they only fix mistakes in the original work. Major changes will cost you money. If we were to provided you endless upgrades to your website until that time where you are completely satisfied and have no more new ideas for improvements and not charge you, we would be working for you endlessly without compensation. If you have difficulty conceptualizing the above, consider this concrete example. Imagine that you are a wedding photographer. You photograph a wedding and deliver the results to your client. Your client asks you to adjust the brightness, contrast or centering of some photos. You provide this service for free. Now, imagine that your client says, “I’m just not very happy with this. I want you to re-photograph my wedding for free. The wedding party will meet at the Church TODAY and you will come and take the photos again, for free. Now, if you did a really lousy job, perhaps you would do this ONCE for free. However, if despite how nice the photos come out, the client repeats this requests, say a dozen times, and asks for new poses and photographic concepts, including different technologies, from the original request, would you do this for free? What if she telephoned you several times a day about it? If you had any brains, you’d dump her. The proper thing to do is to pay to have a first version of your website designed, developed and placed online. Report mistakes you observe in the site. Allow the web author to fix those mistakes and then RECONTRACT with that web author for any new changes, additions or major changes. If you expect all additional changes to be made for free at your whim, take a long walk off a short peer. Attitudes like that are held by slave owners, not clients.
(2)	Pay on time.
(3)	Let your web author know you like her work. Don’t endlessly trash it in an effort to get more work for free. You probably are not very valuable to your web author. He or she can find more clients more easily than you can find a good web author.
(4)	If you find yourself needing to promise that you will find “more clients” for your web author and offering to give the web author free services in exchange for his or her work, then you known damn well that you are not paying enough. This puts you in a position of WEAKNESS. There is nothing wrong with being in a position of WEAKNESS provided you don’t act like you are in a position of strength. Be nice. Do not be arrogant.