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After reading this article, How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell, I just had to tell this story.

Sally's Mount Rainier Photos: her original website.

On August 7, 2009, I received an email from TopDesignFirms.com (a web design directory where I’m listed), for a re-design job. The website owner wanted to redesign/update her website in order to increase traffic and online sales.

This job looked like one I would enjoy doing, as it involves photos of Mt. Rainier, the picturesque national park, just 50 miles from where I live: MtRainierPhotos.com. And to top if off, I would be bringing an archaic website from 1990 back to life!

Turns out that the client lives only ten miles from me, so I went to her house to see what she wanted. I was in total amazement as she had everything planed and laid out with graphic printouts of all her pages. This was going to be a piece of cake!

What she showed me was naturally in need of a designer’s touch, to bring clear focal points to her subjects. The main intention of all this was to sell her calendars and the two guide books she created. So to my home office I returned with all these layouts, to form the coding, and create yet another dream-website.

Sally's Mount Rainier Photos: the first draft.

Sally was tickled pink over the first rendition, complete with a drop down menu, and an image rotator to display her favorite pics. But this was only for her home page; come to find out, she wanted a different header photo for all the various content. I tried to advise her how this inconsistency would confuse visitors. But this was what she wanted, so I complied.

Sally also wanted to be able to edit this site herself, as she had an active blog, and a photo album. So using the WordPress platform was easily the best decision – to change headers for various pages can be performed with WordPress (but I had not done this before).

This was where all the confusion started. Her pictures weren’t the same size, and I had to again convince her about confusing her viewers. So finally, we ended up with all of the headers resized, and placed. But there was more to it than just this: she didn’t want the RSS link displayed at all, and she didn’t want the search box displayed on all of the pages. Both of these were originally inside of the headers.

I complied again. But now she had a change of mind about the background color. She felt that it should be green on some pages, and black on others. After all, green is what Washington State is all about. I complied again, but advised her that this change would take me a lot of additional time, and would need to charge accordingly. She agreed, and I continued on.

During this time, I was swamped with other clients, one of which had an TV news interview, with no website to follow up with. I had advised all of my clients that their jobs would be delayed because of this, and they all understood.

I hadn’t heard from Sally for a couple of weeks, and was now ready to finish up her website. So I sent an email of which she replied, telling me that she had sought out and hired another designer.

NO PROBLEM, no more headaches!!

We agreed that her down payment would suffice for my troubles and went our separate ways. Her website remains unchanged as I finish this post: Sally’s Mount Rainier Photos.