Mothballs and tumbleweeds: the great client disappearing act

Web design, it’s safe to say, is a field which has some very unique challenges.

Just yesterday a colleague and I were commiserating -  to the point where we were saying the same words in unison – about potential clients who ask you to come in and do a sales pitch, and then you send them a written proposal, and then you never hear from them again.  There’s nothing.  No response, no follow up, no returning calls or emails.  My fellow businesswoman and I were in complete agreement over why it’s so frustrating: they asked us to come to them.  The pitch was not the result of a cold call initiated on our side.  We made ourselves available to their needs and questions, we travelled to their offices and put our best feet forward, and we spent a working day drafting a letter-perfect proposal.  And from that, we don’t even get the courtesy of a one-word communication from them.  Even if you’ve followed every bit of best practice in sales and follow up, they completely ignore you like a clique of teenage girls.  One simple word – “no”- is all we’re asking for.  But that’s one more word than you will ever hear from the potential client again.

And it’s now happened to me five times this year.  My colleague had similar sentiments about her own business.  Of course, you know that you are not going to win every project you pitch for.  But you don’t expect to be snubbed entirely.  Obviously, if a potential client behaves in that way, not gaining their custom is no big loss.  But that does not make up for the hours of meeting time, effort, and document drafting that you’ve put in without so much as a thank you.  I wish there was a crystal ball – or a widget, or a plugin, or an app – that could tell you which potential clients will turn out to be tumbleweeds rolling across your desktop and which ones are going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.  But there’s not.

It’s not all bad news, of course.  Sometimes you get that fantastic client who you can work with for years.  They just “get” the web and its potential and provide you with a steady stream of project work that never quite feels like working.

And yet.  Sometimes a client responds to your proposal and you dive into the project together.  And then this happens: analysis paralysis.  A simple question which requires two minutes of the client’s thought goes unanswered for two weeks.  The next question stretches to a month.  And then an entire season has passed since you last heard from the client – even though (and this is the really crazy bit) they have paid you money to perform a service for them.  As with your sales pitch, you make yourself available to them, you remain flexible, you stay in contact, you provide multiple means for them to contact you…and they don’t.

So what’s a designer to do? You have committed to working for them, but they are not working with you.  You can’t actually mothball the project because they have not told you to mothball it.  You want to remain professional and see the work through to its completion, even though the completion date in the contract is so far in the past that you are fully within your rights to send them an Abandonment of Project letter.  You run through your past behavior obsessively, thinking “was it something I did?”, even though you are not the one at fault.  You know that there are perhaps less than two working days left in the project, and the thought that you could have the work done and dusted by the weekend annoys you for the principle of the thing.  Your accounting figures – in your books and in your head – said you’d have made twice as much from this project as you actually have, and that causes problems as well.

How do you handle your mothballed web projects?  Are there any tricks you use to sweep away the tumbleweeds?

Has your web designer gone out of business?

In the spirit of trying something new, I’ve had an article published on the excellent Find Networking Events site.

Click here to learn what to do if your web site designer has gone out of business.

You just don’t understand me!

I’m a web designer.  (You probably noticed that.)  So when looking for services and assistance for my business, I choose providers who have a top notch, efficient, and well constructed web presence.  After all, you wouldn’t choose an architect who lived in a ramshackle house, you wouldn’t choose a chef who hated food, and as a web designer, you wouldn’t choose to place your business in the hands of people who still view the web as a threat to their current business model.

Unfortunately I’m now dealing with two of them.  The first is my business bank, Lloyds TSB.  Their online banking system is a text-only interface, circa 1995, which has one, count ‘em, one image – a heavily optimised jpeg which says “continue to online banking.”  The whole site goes offline for “maintenance” between midnight and 4 AM, which is when we freelancers tend to be hitting our stride.  And the online banking interface’s contact mechanisms literally do not work.  I have now used it to contact the bank about various matters three times.  Anything sent through the interface disappears into a black hole.  You don’t get a confirmation, you don’t get a tracking number, you don’t get an email, you don’t get a callback, you don’t get a letter by post, and you certainly don’t get a personal communication from your assigned “Relationship Manager”, whatever that is.  It’s as if you never contacted them at all.  Today I phoned them to complain about the third instance of a  lack of communication from them and when we eventually got around to discussing the specific issue, the information they gave me over the phone was different from the information provided on their web site.

It’s safe to say I’ll be leaving Lloyds as soon as possible.  The web to them is still some newfangled gadget that they don’t expect people to actually use.  Like many banks, they market themselves as building a personal relationship with you, but I can’t even get them to answer my support requests.  Are they going to understand what I need to grow my web business?  Absolutely not.

The second clueless service is the Public Contracts Scotland web site.  This is the site which lists all public sector tenders in Scotland, with everything from buildings to vehicles to roads to schools to laundry to the Commonwealth Games covered.  Now, every business advisor in Scotland tells you to register on this site.  (It must be in their prepared script.)  So imagine how you feel as a web professional when you see where your profession is categorised: “Other Information Communication Technology.”  Yep, we’re lumped into “Other”, below Call Systems, Consumables, and Reprographic Equipment.   Not surprisingly, the most recent tender listed there was obviously written by a committee of people who have secretaries use their computers for them.  It was so full of pie-in-the-sky jargon which belied a complete ignorance of basic web use that I ended up laughing out loud at it.  Because I’m signed up for email alerts in my “category”, I have to put up with getting alerts for new contracts for the provision of audiovisual equipment.   It’s pretty clear that I’ll never get any business out of my registration there.

It’s staggering to think that in the year 2009, the web itself is still chucked into an “other” catch-all within a subcategory.  Do I want to spend my time putting myself out to people who don’t feel that my profession is worth a name, or do I want to focus on people who view the web as an integrated process – I.E., not the public sector?  It’s a no-brainer.

WordPress pros targeted in dodgy spec work “offer”

I’m a member of the surprisingly useful WordPress group on LinkedIn, which counts just under 3,000 WordPress obsessives professionals in its roster.  This week several dozen of us were targeted by a very dodgy (and likely fake) member recruiting people for a “job” that resorted to every cliche in the book.  The candidate would basically use all that hard-earned WordPress wizardry to create up to 500 identical template web sites on certain topics which scrape information from Wikipedia and would refer site visitors to professionals in that business sector who have paid for the advertising space on the site.  There would be no salary or compensation, and your income would be based on a share of the sales commission revenues “your” sites earned in profit at the end of successful commercial transactions, which, in this particular business sector, could take years.

As for the person behind the “business model”, one of his claims to fame includes stalking and physically assaulting one of his employees as well as her three year old child over money he claimed she “owed” him.  Frighteningly, the job offer asked – illegally – whether you have any kids.  Think about it.  Not even the most psychotic Glasgow gangster would stoop that low.

One of the tenets of the No-Spec campaign is:

At the end of the day, there is a certain irony in spec work. A prospect requesting it is ultimately saying, “My project isn’t important enough to hire a professional who will take the time to understand my situation and goals and invest the time needed to create a suitable solution.”

You could well amend that statement to say that if someone doesn’t want to hire a professional above board, there’s a reason for that.

Anyway, details are available on the LinkedIn WordPress group.

 

Extracting a post’s image as a background in WordPress

Here’s a little trick I just invented.  When using WordPress as a CMS, we often configure it so that a certain post is showcased as a “featured article” on the home page.  That post may well have an image in it.  But for a project I’m currently working on, the design brief calls for the featured article’s image to be displayed as the background in a photo-frame style on the home page, like this.

So how do we extract the post’s image as a background?  To start, the “picture frame” has shadows, so I kept it as part of the div’s background image itself.  So we start with the white box in place already.

First I styled a div for the featured article to fit within the “picture frame.”  I won’t repeat this here, as the way you choose to style your feature is completely up to you.

Then I wrote the code to extract the title and excerpt tags from the latest post in the “Home Page Feature” category.  You can read about how to do it here:

http://wordpressgarage.com/code-snippets/display-posts-from-specific-categories-on-a-page/

I then created CSS styles for the title and excerpt tags.

Now on to the image.  This article will explain how to write a call that will retreive and display images from a post.  After following the guidance in that post, I then enclosed the call within a div, div class=”backgroundfeat”.  It’s important to then style that class so that the image displays behind your title and excerpt tags, but in front of the picture frame.  In my case I went with
z-index: -10;
position: absolute;
left: 0;
right: 0;
top: 0;
bottom: 0;

And voila – the post’s image is now the feature story’s background.

Remember that the image you upload to your post must be sized exactly to fit within the picture frame.

PS – by “picture frame” I mean a thing that holds pictures, not an actual web site frame (god forbid.)