It’s really not something that needs to be discussed, or at least that’s what I thought. Â When you’re working with a client/artist/musician/band/whatever, the asumption is that everyone involved will conduct themselves in a professional manner. Â Unfortunately, at 3 AM, this isn’t what happened.
I get a variety of folks interested in my services. Â In this particular case, a client was unhappy with the progress of his website. Â While the website was complete, the client knew nothing about how to operate a computer, navigate the web, or understand the general functionality of a website. Â In fact, for the first month we worked together, he regularly checked for site updates on his mobile phone — not a smartphone or a web capable device. Â It was just a basic mobile phone with a “simulated” web capability.
Not surprisingly, nothing about his site rendered properly via cell phone, so of course that meant I wasn’t doing my job. Â In addition, rather than learning to use a digital camera (provided by me!), the client insisted that they could take good quality images with this same cell phone. Â And those images were what got used on the final website. Â The images are dark, slightly blurry, and not properly framed. Â Even with careful cropping, they’re just not optimal.
But none of this warrants a 3 AM (and unanswered…) phone call.
Professionally speaking, how do you inform a client that “it’s not me, it’s you?” Â You can’t be accusatory, you can’t insult the client, and you can’t really ever say what you want to.
The immediate temptation is to just inform the client that the site is complete and recommend they take computer lessons. Â When they learn how to use a web browser, they’ll see their finished website and wonder what possessed them to not use their computer sooner.
