Time Wasters

I’ve worked successfully, remotely with clients thousands of miles away from my geographical location without so much as a phone conversation. Meeting up is expensive and so are telephone conversations. There are technologies like Skype, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk that allow me to work seamlessly with them.

But local clients ALWAYS want to meet.
If I had half a chance I would love to meet with all my clients and extend the work-relationship further into a friendship. But when that means meeting for four hours discussing your sister’s education and bitching about your own clients without discussing anything about the work I’m supposed to be doing for you, I really am tempted to charge by the hour.

Why in God’s name do I need to meet to get a brief from a client? I have a document that can be filled in and I ALWAYS follow it up with a phone conversation to understand the client/company/product better. Besides, the non-meeting projects have ALWAYS worked out wonderful with glowing client testimonials so I really have no reason to convert everything to a face-to-face meeting. I’d waste enormous amounts of time socializing and would never get anything done.

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Filed under: from HELL

What’s a wireframe?

When you a get a client who asks you that, who needs a website designed and developed, you know you’re in deep shit. Really deep shit.

As it is delivering a design engagement to a client is tough because they have their own ideas. And when the designer has to teach them their own shit then it becomes one of those arduously long journeys that one takes either because the client’s paying top dollar or because the designer’s dying of starvation.

I have spent more than six hours over a period of two days explaining to the client how important it is to have a spec document that allows the designer to envision the final product as well as give a sensible quote. But the dude doesn’t even know what a wireframe is. And he runs a web hosting company.

Filed under: from HELL