Do what's best for the client, always.
I recently received a call from a company that I used to do business with at my old job. The person that called me handles the territory of Ohio and Eastern Michigan and wanted to meet with me about a possible opportunity to work together. I agreed to meet and listen to what he had to say.
The background
Before I go on let me fill you in on a bit of the background of working with this company. The company is a large national internet company. At my old company we used to build websites for their customers. I would set-up the usual discovery meeting finding out what the customer’s needs and ideas were. We’d figure out a plan of action, put together designs, build the site and then launch. The usual stuff. Except for a couple things. They wanted us to push the customers into their hosting with it’s own proprietary content management system. No exceptions. Hmm…you know I don’t like forcing anybody into a platform, especially something proprietary with a licensing fee attached. The biggest issue was the content manager absolutely mangled website code. It killed any search engine optimization and was not cross-browser or mobile friendly. I hated anytime I had to shoehorn a perfectly good site into this ugly antique interface. I was glad when the relationship ended with them at my old job.
The Reunion
We’ll I met with the fella that called and we talked about the internet and what I thought the future may have in-store. I told him what I thought based on current trending of design, mobility, usability, and search. Some he believed and some he didn’t. That’s okay. He’s a salesman, not a web designer or technical professional of any degree. He then asked the question. He asked whether or not I could work with their clients doing what I used to do at my old company. Work on websites, and then shoehorn perfectly good websites into their pile of crap content manager. Easy answer; NO.
So what’s the point?
Never compromise what you know is in the best interest of the client for money…or prizes. Over the years I’ve developed a plan of action that I know works. It gives clients a great product that does well on the search engines, has good usability, and is very portable from one platform to the next. Chasing money is always a dead end. If you focus on providing the best product you can for your clients, I can guarantee the money will come. You’ll also sleep much better at night. If you say to yourself while working on a project, I hope nobody finds out I did this, stop. Give the money back and move on.
