Project Management Training

Perhaps the biggest problem in dealing with clients is that you’re always trying to satisfy them, or to put it more accurately, you MUST try to satisfy them or you could end up losing them. As a web designer, you know that it’s always a struggle to find the perfect balance between giving vent to your creative best and satisfying your client – there are times when you end up having to exercise immense self control because your target and your client’s seem to be on opposite ends of the world and you have to almost always give in to what they want. This does not make for a very satisfactory design experience, and you feel like you’re compromising on your creative principles in order to make money. This is the bane of every creative artist’s professional life – you have to concede much more than you would like to in the course of your job, and this tends to hamper your artistry and inspiration.

This is certainly not a satisfactory state of affairs, but that’s no reason to become pushy with your designs. Some web designers are guilty of this mistake – they go from one extreme to the other, and become pushy instead of having to accept compromises and cater to their clients’ whims and fancies all the time. While this is all well and good for your creative muse and your ego, it does not bode well for you as a professional. When you try to push your designs on your client, irrespective of their feelings on the subject:

• You risk losing the job to another professional.
• You may not get repeat business from the same client.
• If your client is really disgruntled with the way you handled yourself, they may spread the word about your pushiness and this leads to fewer clients and less business.
• Others in the business, like writers and developers, are reluctant to work with you because your pushiness overrides their feelings and ideas.

The key to being a successful web designer is to find middle ground – you need to ensure that your clients are satisfied and that you have the personal satisfaction of having done a good job. This can be achieved by:

• Coaxing the client to accept your way of doing things by showing them similar designs that other companies in the same business have used successfully.
• Trying to see the client’s point of view and understanding why they want the design they insist on.
• Using some of your ideas and some of theirs so that both of you are satisfied and the client goes home happy.

The bottom line is that you cannot afford to be a temperamental artist when you’re a web designer simply because the competition is fierce, and it’s not just talent and creativity that count – customer satisfaction is what generates repeat business and spells success in the world of web design.