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Note to New Web Designers: Six Ways to Drive Your Clients to Imp Designs
Nov 12, 2009I met with a new prospect this week and their story about their previous web firm inspired me to create this list. If you’re a web development company and you’d like to drive your clients to Imp Designs, be sure to follow this list of practices carefully.
Tell your clients they can’t have access to their files. Nothing makes a client happier to move to Imp Designs than being told that their site files are held in a magic box on the internet that they may never have access to. Make sure to point out that they are obviously incompetent about the web or they wouldn’t have hired you in the first place. At Imp Designs, we gladly give our clients full access to their hosting account. We educate our clients about what they can freely edit and what they may need us to edit. If our clients inadvertently break the site, we bill them to fix it… but in the end it’s our operating philosophy that our clients own their website; we are just the site’s caretaker.
Completely ignore your client’s input about their business. We love working with clients that have worked with ‘know it all’ web firms. The ‘know it all’ firm already knows everything about every business ever created and can shoehorn any business into a cookie cutter web solution. Imp Designs feels every business has unique qualities and goals and that their website should reflect these qualities and function to attain these goals.
When you don’t know how to do something, tell your clients that what they are requesting is stupid. Yessiree, nothing like hiding a weakness with bluster. At Imp Designs we believe in honest answers to clients’ requests. If we are asked to perform a task that we’ve never done before, we ask for a day or two to research and then reply with an informed response.
Use lots of catch phrases, technical terminology and buzzwords to describe what you’re doing. Nothing endears your client to Imp Designs like making them feel really stupid. We can geek-speak with the best of them (it’s a hobby), but as Jerrod our code ninja says, “Sometimes people just want the sausage. They don’t care how it’s made.” We realize not everyone shares our passion for high tech geekery, so we’ve learned to identify the eyes glazing over stare that goes with “I don’t really care about that” and will quickly switch to simplify mode.
Deliver a poorly coded product and demand more money to fix the flaws. An extremely effective device for driving your clients to Imp Designs is to deliver a site with broken links and malfunctioning scripts and then state boldly that you require additional funds to fix the site. This is a proven method for ridding yourself of pesky, gotta have their site working, demanding clients.
Tell your client that Internet Explorer 6 compatibility is just something you won’t do… regardless of their site visitor stats. There isn’t another web firm in the business that will be happier than Imp Designs the day IE 6 dies a gruesome death. We plan to have a day long party on the happy day that we officially discontinue IE 6 support. But the fact of the matter is that some market niches don’t upgrade equipment very quickly. If you refuse to support a browser that a significant number of your client’s target audience uses, please help them out by sending them our way. We’ll grit our teeth and make it happen.
I hope you find the above tips helpful in your quest to drive clients to Imp Designs!
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