Dealing With Clients

May 16th, 2007

New Business From Existing Customers

Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to find new customers. For businesses with products and recurring services, it’s usually obvious how to generate new income from past customers: they buy another box or another haircut or whatever. While there are exceptions, a lot of web [...]

Apr 4th, 2007

Tell Your Small Clients About Standardization

I came across a good article yesterday with the title, The business case for Web standards-based development. I like the break down at the end of the article of all the benefits that come with designing a standards compliant web site.
It got me thinking about the clients I’ve had in the last year. Most of [...]

Feb 21st, 2007

Don’t Guess What Your Customers Want

My guess would be most web designers learn this lesson pretty early, but I’d like to add it to the Best Practices canon anyway. You design web sites all the time for all kinds of clients. As a result, you’ve built up a good deal of knowledge about what does and does not work in [...]

Oct 25th, 2006

Talking to Clients: Phone vs. Email

I should start by saying this post isn’t exactly groundbreaking. I’m confident that I’m not the first person to think about the pros and cons of communicating with clients via phone versus email. That is what is on my mind this week, though, which means it’s going in the blog.

Oct 11th, 2006

Tracking Client Change Requests

Wouldn’t it be great if clients knew exactly what they wanted and could articulate it to you at the beginning of a project? At the very least it would make things faster, but that’s not the world we live in. No matter how much questioning and planning you do before sitting down at your computer [...]

Aug 16th, 2006

Breaking the News To Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Customers

What most clients want to hear about search engine optimization is that a few hours adding some keywords to their site will rocket them to the number one result on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for any and all searches that contain their product or service. In some industries that was possible 10 years ago. I [...]

Jul 19th, 2006

Growing Little Customers Into Big Customers

When it comes to keeping the bills paid, it can be very useful to have a few cash cow customers. These guys and gals always seem to have more work to send your way. In the best possible scenario, they’re even willing to delay projects a month or two if you don’t have the available [...]

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