Amazing... you hire and artist and get... art...

The BBQ Pit
1

Michael, your heart is in the right place, but you are an irresponsible, bubble-headed piece of shit.

What exactly did you think you were paying for, by hiring a web designer, if not for the freakin design?

What part of “It will definitely take more than 5 hours, more like 10” and “the bulk of the work is the design end, adding content is nothing” did you not understand? I TOLD you all this before I EVER started working on this thing. If you had objections, why wait til the design is FREAKING HALF DONE (and, surprise! the labor is already over 5 hours) before you complain about how long it’s taking?

I’m thinking about this like an artist? Well, no SHIT dude. You hire a designer, I assume you want design. If you want a no-frills text-only website, why pay me to do it and not toss it back at the idiot intern who did the current, no-frills text-only site? Silly me, thinking you wanted something DIFFERENT from that, thinking it was the reason behind hiring a DESIGNER.

And all this ON TOP OF the fact that I’m agreeing to do this at LESS THAN HALF my standard fee. When I can’t bloody afford to give shit away for less than it’s worth, because I took pity on your messed-up no-budget non-profit organization. Nevermind the time spent on it that I decided NOT to charge you for, because I was sympathetic to your budget and felt, in a moment of weakness, that the research could be considered my own time. Show me some freakin gratitude. Oh, and while you’re at it, how about going over and signing the contract I gave you? Remind me never to work for you on faith ever again.

By the way, your money problems are NOT MY PROBLEM. If the org won’t give you the money, it’s NOT MY PROBLEM. If you can’t afford this website, maybe you should NOT HIRE A DESIGNER. I’m sure the intern would do it for free.

I can guarantee you I’m not touching the damn thing for one second more until that piece of paper is signed and in my hand. Asshole.

2

Um, did you accidentally click on the SDMB link instead of the Hotmail link? Who’s Michael? A little backstory would go a long way here.

3

Jee thanks for all the empathy and good vibes, Giraffe. I was unaware that a rant had to be accompanied by my life story and couldn’t stand on its own. :rolleyes:

4

Although mentioning somebody by first name without any backstory is a little confusing, I think the rant makes it clear who Michael is and why Kaio is mad. BTW, sorry. That sucks.

5

Sorry, I forgot the {{{Kaio}}}.

Maybe I’m just being a dick, but I hate Pit rants which read like a LiveJournal entry. You’re starting a thread on a public message board – give us something so we know what the hell you’re talking about.

6

Well I understood this rant perfectly and sympathize entirely. Is he only objecting to time and payment, or does he have problems with the design itself? That’s what gets me, when they ask you to design the website and then nitpick every piece of the design. Or worse, when you sit down with them and carefully go over the website contents in order to come up with the design, and then they want something so different that the design won’t work.

Get the contract signed before you put any more of your energy and creativity into the project.

7

One of the things I’ve learned over time is that the more you charge people for your labor, the more they respect you. I’m not quite sure why it works this way, but it does.

I remember when I started tutoring, I was flexible about rates (I used something like a sliding fee scale. I wanted to be able to work with students who were strapped for cash), and I didn’t charge for my time if someone broke an appointment with me because “something came up” or “they found out they couldn’t make it,” because I wanted to do what I though of as “being nice.” I got treated like crap, and no-one who hired me took me seriously.

After a while, I raised my rates and demanded to be compensated for the time I spent waiting for people who didn’t show up. Lo and behold–the people who hired me respected me, I got a lot less flack from prospective customers, and I even started getting referrals. My knowledge of the subjects I helped people with hadn’t changed any; neither had my teaching style. I simply demanded more cash and acted as though my time and effort were somehow worth more.

I think that there’s a deeply ingrained belief in most people that you do, indeed, get what you pay for. And, in general, we tend to assume that people evaluate the worth and quality of their labor accurately. Even though everyone’s been ripped off at some time or another, and most of us can come up with lots of examples of things that are ridiculously overpriced, we tend to accept the quoted prices of things as fair reflections of those things’ value.

I’d recommend that you stop giving deals to not-for-profit agencies. I can understand that you want to support the cause of the organization you’re doing the design work for, but the folks who run that organization are human. That means they’re going to assume that, if you offer them a cheap rate, that that’s all you were ever worth to begin with. If you don’t feel comfortable pocketing the full price of your work when you do a job for these guys, then demand your usual rate, but make a generous donation to their organization later.

8

At the risk of turning this into an economics lecture (don’t worry, what I know about econ you could spit into a cup and have room for tea), I was taught about perceived value, in which the consumer has some idea what something should cost. If you offer a service below that price, the consumer will actually value you less, or become suspicious that you’re pulling a fast one on them.

It’s almost like a reverse bell curve. You can cut prices and gain sales, but when the price falls below its perceived value, you will begin to lose sales.

Your experience, Kaio is exactly why business owners tend to act like, well, business owners. At least the successful ones, who make sure contracts are signed before work commences, who become right bastards about payment (at least about receiving payment; the real bastards delay paying bills as much as possible). When you take pity on someone, you end up cutting your throat, and most of the time, it ain’t worth it.

9

Yeah, I know… I made the mistake of taking it on because he’s a friend of a friend and it sounded like he really wanted to help me out financially, and I really need any money I can get so I figured better some than none. I am not EVER doing this again, and am seriously considering cutting my losses now and telling him just to tell his intern or whoever to add the one or two links if that’s all he really wanted.

I think the problem is he’s too scatterbrained to know what he wants, just that he knows he doesn’t want to spend money on it. When I posted the mock-up, he sent me this incomprehensible email saying that he liked the design but really just wanted to put the questionaire up and can he get that for his $x for 5 hours? This despite the fact that I explicitly informed him a week earlier that 5 hours was unrealistic (to which he said, at the time, fine, we’ll deal with that), that I’d already put in 7+ hours in labor, probably equal to that in research, and we’d previously had a meeting where he listed SIX new pages and a completely new information architecture that he wanted to put into the website. How does that translate into one link for the questionaire? If he’d just had nitpicks about the design, I can deal with that, that’s part of the job. But completely re-writing the project to save himself money only AFTER I’d put in all that effort… that was just low.

He just really pissed me off when he started pissing and moaning about my approaching the project like an artist. Well DUH, that’s what people PAY me to do. And he never once indicated that he desired otherwise. Hell, if he’d said that up-front, I could have added the link and the questionaire in all of 10 minutes and probably wouldn’t have charged him a dime.

Wow, I’m pissing myself off all over again. I think I’d better distract myself for a while before I decide whether or not to tell him to piss off and do his own damn site. :stuck_out_tongue:

10

Working in web design sucks for this reason. People who don’t know what they want, don’t understand the work that goes into it, and don’t want to pay for it. I have encountered so many people like that that I was glad to get out of that situation.

I’m lucky now to only have a single website that I am in charge of constantly, that takes almost all my time in updating, and I don’t have to deal with deadbeats. Only my manager, who can be awkward, but is not even a 100th as bad as the really crappy folk like this Michael dude you’re ranting about.