June 2nd, 2005

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Web Design
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The Web Designer’s Gambit

At Capulet, we do a lot of small, ad hoc web maintenance for our clients. While we’re doing their PR or writing their brochure, a client asks “hey, can you upload that press release, too?” We do it because no one in-house can.

In 80% of cases, the original site designer is long gone. They’ve created the site, delivered it, and gone on to the next project. I can understand why designers do this–maintenance is tedious, uncreative work. However, this phenomenon has two unfortunate results:

  • The designer is unmotivated to design an a site that’s easy to maintain. They’re unlikely to touch it again, so they build the site the way they want, with little view toward extensibility and code re-use. So what if there’s three nested tables? It looks right today.
  • The designer’s site slowly morphs into something else as we implement client requests. The web designer gets dismayed as their portfolio piece gets less and less like what they originally designed.

This is the designer’s gambit: they don’t want to update the site, but it’s the only way to maintain the quality and purity of their design.

Apparently few designers are actually worried about this gambit, though. For every new site we’ve designed (and we’re not really a web design company), we’ve maintained four. I’m surprised this is the case, because you’d think designers would want some reliable, recurring revenue.

While I’m on the subject of our design work, I’ve been meaning to link to CoastalTrek.com, a site we did for a health resort near Comox. It’s a Bryght site.

Comments: 7 Responses so far

donna
June 2nd, 2005
11:33 pm

what’s really annoying is when someone hires a designer, the designer rabbits, and they call the web hosting company expecting us to do free updates for them, and getting mad at me when we won’t.

Yeah, yelling at me because you don’t know what you’re doing is a real good way to make me want to help you. Pfft.

[Reply]

Olaf Gradin
June 3rd, 2005
5:30 am

I generally try and encourage customers with price reductions and service aggregation to get them to purchase a service contract (maintenance). It keeps me involved with the customer and their plans, while ensuring their site stays up-to-date.

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Lincoln
June 3rd, 2005
6:45 am

Olaf, you’re bang on.

Our maintenance contract revenue outstrips our new development revenue — and, I see it as a sliver of good ‘net stewardship (fewer out of date sites out there). We try to encourage our customers to keep their sites up-to-date and in line with their current marketing strategy, and the “you’re already paying for it, so you should use it!” line is great incentive, as opposed to a la carte updates that clients wince at every time we bill them.

‘Course, that doesn’t mean they always listen to us…:)

[Reply]

timsamoff
June 3rd, 2005
7:47 am

I, for one, strive to design maintainable, changeable sites… But, that’s just me. I’ve had to dive into many sites (like a current one I maintain) that were not designed for a first-party user. Many “ughs.”

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Paolo
June 3rd, 2005
8:06 am

I’m not sure where you got the information that designers don’t want to maintain a relationship with their clients and based on the responses so far I think you may find yourself having to revise your opinion.

I’ve always encouraged my clients to stick with us for updates and maintenance but often they prefer to try and do it themselves or find someone in-house who says they can do it — yeah right!

IMHO and my experience this is more of a client issue than a designer issue.

[Reply]

Darren Harkness
June 3rd, 2005
8:30 am

I happily provide maintenance, but I also generally make it easy for the client to update their site - if it’s a site they perceive they will need to update often. I do this by essentially building an ad-hoc CMS for them, that is linked to the pages they need to update (essentially, I give them a login for the site, which then populates each page’s contents with links to add/edit/delete content).

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Darren
June 3rd, 2005
10:00 am

What can I tell you–the vast majority of our clients had fire-and-forget designers. In some cases, this may have been the client’s fault (or the designer’s, for not closing the deal).

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