In the military there are certain acronyms, or one or two-syllable words that people can utter that let you know immediately that something is wrong.  Words like “Mayday”, or “Gun!”, “Fire”, “Bomb” or evn “Bogey, 6 o’clock”...you catch my drift. So should there be terms in the design industry that we can utter amongst ourselves when we hear or see things that raise red flags.  Picture if you would - a lead has been generated and you are speaking with the prospective customer for the first time and they say something like, “We are looking for a web designer to design something that will, uhh, put us up on the top of the web page - you know, with hyperlinks (annunciated dramatically) and photos - yeah, can we get have our company information on Google.com?”.  Say what? Hyperlink what!, WTF are you talking about?!

As it turns out, this customer did not know the difference between a company web page and the results that appear on Google.  It took me a while to figure this out because he kept wanting to know why he couldn’t just have a link on Google and not a website?  Yes, yes, this is one of those scenarios where, instead of being Mr. nice guy businessman who is there to hand-hold mom and pop, I should have run like the wind - away from this potential client. 

Why you ask?… my fellow Heroes… I’ll tell you why.  I wanted to treat this project as a ‘get it in, get it out’, kick out a logo, a site, and a data capture CMS - likety split right?  I’d keep the cost low for the project, do a nice simple site, botta bng botta bang. NOT. Well, the bottom line is that I budgeted about 30-40 hours for this project and it turned out to be about 100+ hours.  I could go through the various issues that came up in the project - why the client was mad because I couldn’t read their mind, or why they couldn’t figure out why ongoing changes to the site weren’t free..yada yada yada, but that would take too long.  My point is this.  Be VERY careful about who you choose as a client, listen for things like:

* over-use of the term “hyperlinks” (BLAM! - Red Flag!)
* consistently uses the words “world wide web” (BLINGO - Another Red Flag!)
* or comments like, “hey my daughter came up with this design, can you tweak it a little for us - how much will this cost?” (Zingo - BIG Red Flag!)
* or even the ‘cool guy’ (who for some reason thinks that he understands what you do) who says that he built the previous site in “C++, Macromedia and PERL”.  (RUN!...run for your very lives!)

Ok, here’s the deal, I certainly don’t expect every potential client to be able to walk in the door and know all the lingo, understand everything about the web, typography, design, usability and so on.  What I do expect though is that if they don’t know or understand something - they should say it.  Hearing something like, ‘Hey, I don’t know much about this stuff, but I’d really like to feature my company online in a much more professional fashion’.  This is what they are supposed to say. 

Also, I am not trying to tell you to not take on a project just because someone doesn’t have much knowledge about our industry… All I’m saying is that you should be careful, and listen for key words (no, not SEO words) - words that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.  And remember, it’s the smallest projects that can cause the biggest headaches.

SP