Eric J. Gruber

Seth Godin, author of the book, “Purple Cow,” has an interesting post on his blog today. It’s interesting because obviously Seth can read my thoughts, because I was going to write on this very topic, with much of the same wordage, eariler this week.

See it here: The Customer is Always Right

In my effort to make plenty of cash before the baby comes, I took on yet another web site job. It could have been a slam dunk: it was for a Montessori preschool here in Lawrence. What they wanted: six pages, clean design, all the usual stuff, pictures of their students and school.

No problem. I can do that, and I’ll make it better than any other Montessori school in Lawrence. Roar.

I’d like to draw attention to a quote from Godin’s aforementioned artile:

“If the customer is wrong, they’re not your customer any more. In other words, if it’s not worth making the customer right, fire her.”

Another odd coincidence, the school’s owner was, in fact, a her. Moving on. …

It started out pretty well, I thought. I got all the information, I looked at other sites they (she and her husband, who was often overbearing and butted in more times than I cared for) suggested, and then got to work. But when I showed them my first working draft of a logo, they were less than thrilled. So, they sent their logo back to me and said, “Use this instead.” What was it? Oh, just a little piece of crap they made in Microsoft Word combined with some other odd images.

“No big deal,” I thought. “I guess I can use that. It looks like crap, but they’re the customer, and the customer is always right (because they’re paying).”

They wanted some type of navgation that allowed a type of “drop down” effect as seen here, even though they really didn’t have enough pages on their web site to merit that type of navigation, I made it work. Why? Well, because the customer is always right (because they’re paying).”

When I showed them my interpretation of what they wanted, the floodgates opened. They then preceded to give me a complete mock up of their web site in Microsoft Word and told me, “We (again, why the husband had so much of a say in his wife’s ideas for the web site is beyond me) want the site to look exactly like this.”

“OK,” I said. Why? Because the customer is always right (because they’re paying).”

When everything was completed to those specifications and I sent it to them, I got another e-mail with another Word document, with more changes.

“OK,” I said to myself.

And then it hit me: I don’t need the money this bad. These people aren’t listening to me. I’ve been creating web content for the last few years professionally. There are dos and there are don’ts, and all these people wanted were the don’ts of web design. In fact, I’d dare to say that I did know more of what their customers wanted and needed than they did. The customer was wrong.

So I fired them. And the sweet thing is, I did it in such a way that made them think it was their idea to “find someone else who better suited their needs.” But the truth of the matter is, I wasn’t working on this project anymore, because the money wasn’t worth it for the loss of sanity.

When I got to the point that I didn’t want my name on the project, I knew it was time to say, “Oh, screw it.”