[thelist] What would you do?

Bart Posselt BPOSSELT at dineout.org
Tue Apr 10 15:36:06 CDT 2001


I work for one of the big, bad clients that can't nail down what we want the designers/developers to do. We've never shopped proposals around like that, though. 

The contractor we've hired to do a lot of our work got smart after doing a fixed-price project that took about four months longer than they expected. They now give us fairly loose estimates based on how many hours of work they think something might take and then charge us by the hour. 

BTW, I quit filling out "project surveys" or whatever you want to call them a long time ago. Maybe it was just the people I was dealing with before we found our current contractor, but the questionnaires almost always had questions like how big our organization was, what our budget is, who the key decisionmakers are in our organization, etc. It was more like answering a marketing survey that was going to be turned around and sold. 

If you're having problems getting a client to fill out a form, just call them up and schedule a face-to-face or a conference call to hash out what they want. You'll be able to tell them about options they may not know about or suggest a better way of doing something. By the time someone writes down a description of how they want something to work or look like, it's solidified in their mind that that's how it should be.

Bart


>>> kyle at a-s-i.com 04/10/01 03:15PM >>>
> They approached me some time ago for a proposal, and I gave them a document to
> fill out to get a gist of their project needs. This is one of those clients
> that wants to know "how much" before I know anything about their site needs.
> They never filled it out, though I followed up twice.

This is pretty much standard procedure where I work.  Except for the sending
us some one elses' quote.  I've found most clients come to us and ask for a
web site and have no idea what they want or need.  We discuss their needs
and options and give rough estimates based on that.

We'd like to at least ask for content up front so then we could estimate
based on that as well, but we've found if you ask for that your lucky if you
ever here from them again.

I've resigned myself to believe that most clients don't have even the
slightest clue what a website means or is even for.  They just think they
should have one and don't want to know anything about it.  The more you ask
for from them, the less likely you are to get the job.  It makes our jobs a
lot tougher and makes the project more expensive than it would be if the
client would just take some responsibility, but it just seems to be the
norm.

If anyone cares to share any better ways of dealing with clients I would
love to hear them.

    later,

        kyle

Kyle Smeby
ASI Image Studios
http://www.a-s-i.com/hyper/kyle.htm 


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