Dealing with Clients: Don't Slam the Competition
Category: Society & Culture...
Posted Sunday, January 20, 2008 at 05:35 PM [GMT-6]

Much of my work involves redesigning existing websites. The owners of these sites approach me for a variety of reasons: the original designer graduated from high school (or junior high); the original designer disappeared without leaving contact information (we web designers seems to be an unreliable breed); the original designer switched to an occupation that pays a living wage; and so on.

Most of these sites are a mess, both from a cosmetic and a coding perspective. Most were built using FrontPage, and while that in itself doesn't doom a site to failure, it is generally an indication that the creator wasn't a professional.

The clients for most of these projects have no illusions about the state of their sites. They are often apologetic and/or embarrassed about how their sites look, and what they think it implies about them and their company or organization. And, frankly, they're usually right. But there's one thing I've learned over the years of dealing with these situations:

No matter how ugly the site is, no matter how many web standards it violates, no matter how unprofessional the image it presents, I never explicitly point out those shortcomings to the clients in a way that blames someone else for the problems.

Case in point. I had lunch a week or so ago with the board of a local organization who needed a site makeover. Their site had all the previously mentioned shortcomings and then some. They knew it (well, they knew it was ugly and out-of-date; they didn't know from web standards, and I didn't expect them to) or they wouldn't have asked me to meet with them.

Instead of launching into a laundry list of all the shortcomings of the site's design, I asked them about their vision for the site. The first comment was something like this: "our website is horrible and needs to be fixed!" There were smiles and nods all around.

Even then, I didn't aggressively agree. I said, "yes, I think there are several things we can do to make the site more attractive and more effective." And we launched into a productive discussion of how to improve it.

See, the thing is, the person who built the site was a member of the organization. It might have been a relative of one of the board members, or a friend, or even a well-meaning volunteer. There was nothing to be gained by denigrating those efforts – and a lot to be potentially lost by doing so.

It's one thing for "family" to slam their own; it's quite another for outsiders to join in. Since you never know for sure the relationships and dynamics of the situation, it's best to stay focused on the facts, and to look forward rather than rehashing old mistakes.

Now that I think about it, a lot of things in life would probably go more smoothly if we put this philosophy into practice.