Painful lesson learned - advice?

Hi Carrie,

Sorry to hear about your bad experience with this client. Unfortunately this is quite common in the web design business. I don't do freelancing myself (I work for a university), so hopefully someone else can come along and give you some better advice. If it were me, and I didn't really need the money, I'd just drop this client. It doesn't sound like it's worth it.

Otherwise, you could start increasing your billing hours. Here are some tips from a professional graphic designer:

http://www.andyrutledge.com/calculating-hours.php

For large design projects, I require 50% up front before the work even starts, and the other 50% before anything is released to them.

You are sort of on that page, but you need to get that 50% before you do anything more. Here's why: they have nothing invested in you yet. Nothing is stopping them from walking away from you and finding the next designer to mooch off of. Once they pay your deposit, it shows that they are committed. The only thing I will do for free is provide a quote and a proposal. Everything else costs money.

Ya, you can get caught in that endless revision pattern. The proposal should specify how many revisions the original cost covers before you start to tack on hourly charges.

I have to admit that I usually do a design comp, like you did, before charging anything. My comp usually goes with the design brief and quotation.

That's probably because creating a comp is my favourite part of the design process. It's also due to being able to use the same comp for multiple projects (after a few hours tweaking). Those are my personal reasons, in business terms comp-before-cash has the benefit that you get to find out whether the client is a nutter before you're committed to the project.

The silver lining to your cloud is, as you haven't taken any of their money, you can say 'Thanks, but no thanks.'

It's your choice in the end, and depends on how much you need the cash, but I would dump the client. No need to be impolite either, just write a very apologetic e-mail telling them that you don't feel it's possible to work with them.

This is just conjecture: it seems like there's a third-party involved here. The client 'loves' the design and your proposal, then there's a sudden 180 degree turn, complete with rebuke on the subject of site ranking. Very suspicious, like the proposal was forwarded-on to some boss -- with enough knowledge to make them dangerous.

I don't think you did anything wrong. Maybe in future you'll get a better Spidey-sense of who the difficult clients will be, then perhaps with those you should charge up-front. Or do things the way pr0gr4mm3r suggested.

Overall: there is no right or wrong way about doing these things. Tweak how you charge and when, until it fits you and your business. This has obviously been a great learning experience, and I do hope you'll find another use for those design comps you did!

Welcome to the Webmaster Forums!

Last summer I met a man who owns a cab company, and over the course of our conversations (on rides back and forth between my home and my job) I discovered that he wanted to make a Children's book about a police dog. He used to be a cop and he likes police dogs. So one night at work I sat down and sketched out this police dog, as I saw him in my head. In the morning I showed the drawing to him, and he loved it. We talked some more about the police dog on the ride to my place, and then he changed his mind and said this would be a good character to use as a logo for his cab company.

Long story short, I ended up creating a logo, business cards, and fliers for his company incorporating the dog. I created the whole thing in Illustrator, the first time I'd ever used that program, and I was quite pleased with how it all turned out. He was ecstatic and he bartered free rides back and forth to work for one year as payment for the artwork. This was cool with me, since I don't have a car and riding my bike all the time can be a pain, especially when the weather is bad.

Unfortunately, this arrangement only lasted for about a month. I won't go into any personal details, except to say this: always make sure you have some written agreement between you and your client, signed by both parties, just in case things decide to go south. Which, in this case, they did.

To prevent the above scenario from happening ever again I now have a procedure that I follow whenever I am contacted by a client. First, I ask them what their budget is for their particular project. I can't tell you how much time is wasted by people who contact me to design something, but then when the subject of money is considered they bug out (like the cab guy). So it's important to get that topic up front right away. I also inform them that I require half of the total projected for the project before any work begins.

I also send them a design request form which lists questions to ponder over, like what colors they would like for their design, fonts, page layouts, etc. I tell the client to consider these questions carefully and then send it back. If we are good to go after that then I send them my design contract to sign and fax back to me. Once I sign it I fax a copy back to them.

I find this procedure works pretty good and it helps eliminate the deadbeat losers like the cab guy.