Clients you may wish to loose!

Most of the clients are good, some are great but few can be your headache. Look at some of these web project clients with whom jobs might not work well.

1. When the client takes 6 months to respond to the proposal, but doesn’t extend his project delivery date.
2. When you have traveled for the meeting with client at your own expense and he tells you that he does not have a budget for this project but is open to future projects.
3. When the client can’t clear a single desired user goal, he is also not clear about a business strategy, an online strategy, a reason for the website’s existence, or a goal or metric for improving the website but he has designed detailed drawings of his own idea.
4. Client desires the best website and when you tell him what the best costs, he asks if you can scale back. You prepare a scaled back proposal, but, without revealing his own budget, the client asks if you can scale it down more. After putting hours into the negotiation, client asks for just the home page design in Photoshop.
5. While back-end coding is finishing, client rethinks the website architecture.
6. As the first meeting is about to wrap, the person at the end of the table, who has been silent since the beginning of meeting, suddenly opens his mouth.
7. When the client cleverly tells you he knows his existing website ‘sucks’ and accepts quite freely that he doesn’t know what to do about it. He asks how you would resolve such a problem and when you begin to speak, he starts reading messages on his mobile phone.
8. At beginning of the first meeting, client informs you that someone has just bought his company.
9. Client begins first meeting by making a big show of telling you that you are the expert. He says that you are in charge and he will depend upon you because you understand the web and he does not.
10. Client introduces you to all his employees, shows you the factory area and behind closed doors, tells you that if you do a bad job with this website, he will be going to have to let these people go.
11. When the client sends a 50 page detailed request for proposal, including management approved flow diagrams created in MS-PowerPoint Slides.
12. When the client announces that he is a ‘vision guy’ and will not be involved in small matters in designing the website. He also tells you that the contact person, his colleagues and employees will be fully empowered to approve each deliverable.
13. After the beta release, the previously uninvolved ‘vision guy’ sends PowerPoint slides of his idea of how the website layout should look like. These diagrams have nothing to do with the requirement analysis and usability study you conducted, nor with the approved wire-frames, nor with the approved final design layouts, nor with the approved HTML pages that you are now incorporating into the CMS.
14. When the client tells you he has done a usability study with his wife for the website.
15. Your preferred client, for whom you have done some good work in the past, gets a new Boss.
16. When the client demands Web 2.0 feature but can not express his business strategy or target users.
17. Just before the website delivery, the company fires your client and his envious junior gets the delivery. The website never launches. Six months later, a new person in your old client’s job emails you to invite you to redesign the website.