I had a local company ask me to make a couple of website mockup layouts for an on-site presentation. I was excited. "No problem," I told him. I worked a couple of hours and developed a couple of nice web pages. I burned them to a CD and off I went with high expectations to our face-to-face meeting. Everything seemed to go well; he asked me if he could keep the CD to make a decision on which design layout he wanted. So I left my CD, and several days later I received an email saying that he decided to hire another web designer.
So with hurt feelings I decided to take a look at this company's new website. Imagine my surprise when the site loaded and glaring at me on my computer monitor was my design! What could I do? Not much. After all I was the one who left the CD with him. I definitely learned my lesson. So how can you avoid this type situation and protect yourself? Here are a couple of tricks that I came up with.
1. If your potential client has Internet service available where you will be meeting your client, upload your web pages to a spare hosted site or test URL and go over the designs live on the server. Print hard copies of the designs which you can make notes on while discussing more layouts options. After your meeting, go home and take the website down if that makes you feel more comfortable.
2. If they do not have Internet service available, I do the mockup development as a PowerPoint presentation. I can safely leave the CD with the client, because no layout is there to be used - just a JPG within the PowerPoint file.
We need to be good to potential clients, but we also need to look out for ourselves. This is just a little lesson learned in the web designer way of life that I learned the hard way. Hopefully, it will help you to avoid this type situation.
// posted by BasicAnn on 7/12/2005 01:21:00 PM / Permanent Link 
| Post Archives | Post a Comment | Subscribe to Blog 
