WEB DESIGN ETHICS – PART III

A meeting is a meeting, right? There is nothing to it. You go along, meet your prospective client, tell them how wonderful you are, listen to what they want, interpret it, agree a price and off you go. Simple.

Except, umm, no.

We have a thing about meetings. They start long before the physical meeting. They start the moment you make contact on the phone, in reply to an enquiry, through an introduction or however you come to know of your potential new customer.

They’re the single most important part of the whole web design company to website delivery cycle. By far. If you get your approach to meetings right, you can guarantee that the number of clients that place orders will increase.

The beginning

Let’s say that you know a physical meeting is going to take place. You’ve got that far. You’re speaking to the client about the arrangements for the meeting. This is where we have a set of rules that kick in straight away.

1. Offer, in fact take it is a presumption, that you’ll be meeting them at their premises.
2. Find out how they might expect you to look….
3. Confirm the time and date by e-mail, and include the reason you’re meeting.
4. Immediately allocate the time in your diary, including ample travel time either side of the meeting.
5. Prepare

You’d be surprised how many freelance developers in particular won’t offer to meet a client at their premises. Keeping your costs down is one thing, but not even having the common courtesy of offering to travel to a client is another. Plus, you want to see where they operate – visiting them gives you the biggest insight into their business that you could ever get. There are a million and one things that the eye can pick up on a client site that you’ll never get if you don’t go.

Expecting them to come to you will also set alarm bells ringing – and rightly so.

Finding out how they might expect you to look will no doubt have many readers shaking their heads and thinking ‘what?’. It’s simple – different companies have different expectations. If you don’t know a great deal about them so far then you need to make sure your first physical impression is the right one. Ask yourself this…

1. If you turn up in jeans and a T-shirt, in true casual designer mode, and they’re all in conservative styled suits…what do you think they might gauge of you? You might not judge on looks, but a huge amount of people still do. Don’t let it catch you out.
2. If you turn up in a suit, and they’re a heavy engineering firm with an owner who greets you with his overalls covered in oil, offers you a seat covered in even more oil and is made to feel like he’s just met a smarmy salesman in a suit….what do you think you’ve just done? It’s a matter of perception – but it’s much more a matter of doing everything you can to pre-empt what that perception might.

Take scenario number one. If you’d asked them in advance (it’s a straight forward question!) if they’re a suit-wearing organisation, they’ll not think any less of you and you’ll avoid the potential embarrassment (we say ‘potential’ because not everyone will judge on your looks after all). If they say they’re really not too concerned, wear the suit anyway. They wear theirs for a reason – comfort. It makes them feel comfortable. So should you.

Take scenario two – he’s likely to have said ‘nooo, don’t turn up in a suit!’ – or on the other hand he might say ‘it’s up to you’. But you’ve asked. He’ll remember that. You can even make it a point of casual conversation – it’s a superb ice breaker.

Get yourself some t-shirts and sweatshirts printed with your company logo on. Wear them if you go on a casual dress appointment. You immediately give a much more professional impression in an albeit casual style.

You’re doing all of this to make a client comfortable and meet their expectation – if you didn’t, you might lose something. If you do it, you’ll have lost absolutely nothing but possibly gained an awful lot.

Confirming

Sending them that e-mail to confirm the time and date is critical. Make a point of briefly saying why you’re coming. It emphasises a point and leaves no room for error – and you’ll get a lot less time wasters if you do it because the formality (however you word it) of saying you’re arriving and why will put a lot of the less serious customers off. If they’re genuine, it won’t put them off in the slightest.

Not to mention the fact that if you arrive and they say they’d forgotten, or that the time wasn’t as agreed – you have something to fall back on. If you arrange a meeting a week or more in advance, it’s also useful to send a reminder the day before you go. Many will view that as a reason for the client to cancel. If they do, you saved a wasted trip. Most business people won’t do that. If they do, they’ve either got a genuine reason and will reschedule, or again you’ve not had a wasted trip.

Incidentally, if you’re a freelancer with an ISP or webmail (Hotmail etc) designated e-mail address (such as dodgydave@hotmail.com) then drop it now. Immediately. Sort yourself out. You’re serious about being a professional web designer? Start getting professional.

The time

Do not be late. Common sense isn’t it? Much of these could apply to any profession, but did you know web designers are late for appointments more than almost any other sector? Why? Just get organised! Arrive 10 minutes early and say you’re a little early – it’s much better than being 10 minutes late!

Similarly, make sure that if you’ve got another appointment immediately after that you allow ample time to get there. Meetings can often over-run and you don’t tell someone who is trying to give you business that you ‘need to go’. Just don’t do it.

Preparing

Here it is, the critical one. Even if you ignore all of the above (good luck to you), the very least you can do is to prepare and research your client. Use local directories, find out about the company, get a copy of their accounts, know them before you get there. It is the one sure-fire way of making the right impression. Know their market too – research it. Find out who else competes in their market and if they have a web presence – and assess it.

Many web companies and designers view this as unpaid time and they won’t do it. Don’t fall into the same trap. Find out everything you can and you’ll look a hundred times more professional than your competition when they find out you’ve done your homework.

Face to Face

So, you’ve done all of this and you’re now sat opposite them. Great, well done.

Now, be true to yourself and remember these rules:

1. Don’t say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘I don’t know’ or ‘no’.
2. Ask them how technical they are, how much you need to tailor your delivery of your opinion and thoughts – some people (many) will be too embarrassed to say you’re talking jibberish to them! Equally, don’t patronise them by presuming no knowledge. A simple question.
3. Don’t attempt to gloss over something. Explain things in full because you don’t want it to come back and bite you in the form of ‘that’s not what you said’.
4. If they want the impossible, tell them honestly and openly – but politely.
5. Ask them what their budget is. This is a must. You’re not doing it to find out how much they’re prepared to pay – far from it. You’re doing it to find out whether you can deliver their project at all. If the budget isn’t enough – tell them and explain why.
6. Do NOT fall for the ‘rough price’. You really shouldn’t be giving rough prices until you have properly estimated the time their project will require – you should be getting back to them with a formal quotation that fully explains and justifies your price with details of what they’ll get for their money.
7. If you can’t avoid the ‘rough price’, because some clients may get quite pushy about it, simply tell them what the cheapest project you’ve ever worked on was – and then what the costliest project you’ve ever worked on was. If you know the cost of theirs isn’t like the site you wrote for a major conglomerate, say so. But do not give them a price – they will hold you to it when you’ve simply not evaluated their needs properly. This isn’t just for your protection – it is for theirs too.

Saying yes to something you can’t do falls into the category of suicidal. Just be honest. If you say yes because you want their business, but you categorically know the answer should have been ‘no’ – you’re heading for trouble. If you can’t do something (or they’re being unrealistic) then you don’t want the order. The last thing you want is a job that gives your company nightmares and a large legal bill at the end of it.

Tailoring your conversation to their level is something web developers do – very badly! Ask them if they understand something. If they don’t, they’ll usually say. If they say they do understand it, read their body language – many might be embarrassed to say and you can often find it is a matter best addressed in a follow-up e-mail that details everything in laymans terms when they’ll feel much more comfortable than saying they don’t understand something to your face.

Glossing over a subject is something we think you’ll find clients do more than designers. You might want to explain what is and isn’t possible. Or, you may be saying you can’t guarantee Google page rank and they reply by saying ‘Yes, but I’ll get a high ranking, I know you’ll do that for me…’. Stop them.

Explain the position and don’t let them gloss over a subject to such an extent that they’ve committed you to something without you even realising it. Clients might also gloss over a subject to minimise the value of your work. You know it’s going to take 100 hours – but they say ‘yes, so a couple of days’. Don’t let them do that.

You have to explain what is involved for two reasons. Firstly, because you’ll be justifying your price and the value for money they’re getting. Secondly, because if something is explained all too easily they’ll try to get your perfectly reasonable price down. This isn’t about sales – it is about being honest and open – yet a lot of clients will be a lot more proficient at sales than you might be.

Wanting the impossible – well don’t we all! Unfortunately web designers like to promise the impossible. Please don’t be one of them. Tell it like it is and say what you can’t do. There isn’t much more to say on that one except that you need to remember some people genuinely don’t realise what is involved and might want a replica of the Porsche 3D configurator for less than the price of fuel you used to get to see them – explain why it’s impossible (politely!).

Asking a client what their budget is seems to be a difficult question for a lot of people in the web industry. We’re not sure why. You’re asking someone how much they budgeted for their project. They know the sum, roughly.

You’re not asking them because you’re going to quote a just below it (and if you are than you shouldn’t be in this industry anyway). You’re asking them so you don’t waste their time or your time. Don’t even react to it though.

Go away, do your preparatory work on the quotation, and then remember what the budget was. If it’s going to be do-able for less than budget, great! You’ve saved them some money and they’ll be pleased with that. If it’s going to be more – you’re going to need to explain why. The key to this point is one all web companies know of – some people just have no idea how much their website might cost. Some will under budget by a colossal amount – others will over budget. Remain true to them by quoting accurately and fairly.

Nearly all web designers and web companies have encountered the ‘Oh my god’ moment. That’s the time when you went to an appointment and discovered that they wanted an eCommerce site to rival Amazon for the price of a years hosting. We’ve all been there.

On those occasions we accept that you don’t need to go away and think about it – just say it there and then (as reasonably courteously as you can). The rough price request is a plague in the world of web design. If you want to run a professional web company now or in the future then you’ve got to gauge your costs accordingly, decide your margin, factor in the potential future worth of a client – and formally calculate your quote. Yet more and more people quote rough prices that a client will treat as reasonably accurate.

Yes, if you say ‘rough guide’, we assure you that they interpret that as a price that will not vary by more than 10-15% above or below what you said.

If you have a policy of types of websites falling into a certain price bracket then it’s a little different – you can quote for a very set package (corporate identity sites are usually a good example of this) and you can also tell them that you’ll give prices for extensions to that package (options, additions etc).

Lastly, tell them when you’ll get back to them with your quotation (if that’s what you agree to do) – and make sure you do.

The quotation is the next thing we’re going to cover in this series. For us, quotations aren’t a quick thing. We put time and effort into constructing them and delivering value – and we’ll tell you why soon….