Whilst all clients are unique individuals, there are several traits and behaviours that have appeared from one customer to another.

Most requests for my work is for web design by small business owners predominately outside of the UK. It would seem that these unfortunate beliefs and behaviours cross boundaries of country, race and language, and I’ve witnessed many of these traits in completely polar industries too.

With this in mind, you never know when you might come across a client that has one of these behaviours.

I hope that this article might help some aspiring freelancers out there to be more prepared for any occasion when they find themselves in situations similar to those listen below.

1. Aren’t you a mind-reader?

You’re the designer. They’re a director of a packaging company. They have no idea how they want their web layout to look, but tell you, “If you knock something up, I’ll know if I like it.”

Great. So, on the off-chance that I manage to read your mind and deliver something that meets your unpublished expectations, we will continue to work together? Plus, if I do manage to pull this off, there will be no recognition of my clairvoyant powers.

This type of design is called “concept design” and is very different to standard design; and should be handled and biled very differently too.

Design is a two-way street. As a designer, you’ll need to impress upon the client that they play an active role in the success of the project as well.

I normally ask for examples of their existing branding that they wish to retain. For example an existing logo, colour pallete or any other stationary. If this is not available (for example, if it’s a new start-up company), then questions about their target customers, demographic and any culture or message that they wish to convey to their clients often helps me to at least determine whether a comic, corporate, web 2.0 or other style is needed.

2. I don’t really have much money or I tell you that I don’t really have much money

These two are not the same.

Some clients genuinely have tiny budgets for their projects. Others have a larger availability of funds, but want to give the impression that they don’t in order to secure a bargain price.

I’ve encountered customers in the past that have claimed that the work is for a charitable organisation and, once the project was in flow, it became quite clear that the work was for a commercial company with 10 UK offices and 4 overseas branches!

As the freelancer, it’s your responsibility to identify which of these your client actually is.

Personally, I’ve found that the best way of doing this is to discuss the rough project requirements over the phone or via email before you meet with them. If your work is 100% online, ask for details of their current site or business and check it out. I wish I’d done this with my “charity” case above…

3. Free advice and wasting time is just the price of being in business

Time is free?

If you’re thinking that potential clients will come right out and tell you that they’re not going to hire you the moment the thought pops into their head, think again.

This of course might be the moral thing to do, but many clients are of the opinion, “Hey, designers are paid to provide free information and advice. Sometimes they get paid and sometimes they don’t. It’s just the cost of doing business.”

Some potential clients do this in order to fill their own knowledge gaps about the process or price, and test the water before proceeding with a project. Whilst I’m sure we can all understand and even appreciate the importance of this kind of leg work, the impact on your workload can be immense.

I offer a completely free of charge mock-up service for web design, which many would say is a potential waste of time and risk – actually inviting clients to eat into my availability.

In fact, I’ve found that many clients will want to see some form of work prior to bringing you on board, so I would probably be providing this service anyway.

By offering the service openly, I reduce the pressure for my clients and, if they decide not to proceed with the design, I provide the design as a tutorial or add to my store for other customers to benefit from.

4. I hired you 3-years ago and you’re still on retainer

Seriously?

One of the biggest peeves that I have is when clients believe that, because you have completed and delivered a project to them, you are their new “go to guy” whenever they have any technical issue – in some cases even if it’s not related to the project you completed.

I took a holiday for 10 days last year. No computer. No emails. Complete IT blackout whilst I enjoyed some well-earned time away from the monitor. When I returned, I had over 20 emails from a customer for whom I built a site in 2005 – over 4 years ago.

Apparently, they had moved server hosts and their PHP contact form now longer worked. They weren’t receiving emails and, as the site was for a holiday villa, felt that they were losing bookings and money because of this.

Although the tone of the unanswered emails progressively became more aggressive, the initial contact email wasn’t exactly overflowing with praise:

“Your programming has stopped working and you need to fix it for us ASAP”

Seriously!

After I replied, apologising that I had been on holiday, I asked if they had changed anything on the site. They replied that they had moved hosts, and I told them that their new host had caused the issue and they may not have PHP support with their new host. They upgraded their host and continued to bombard me with emails asking me to take a look at the code.

Eventually, I gave in and took a look. After about 15-minutes, I ascertained that they had also changed their email address when they changed hosts.

There was no offer of payment for the service – there wasn’t even a thank you email. In fact, I received only one more response which simply said that they would “test and get back to me with any problems”.

In hindsight, I could have avoided this if I had just explained that this was a separate project and treated it as such; provided a quote and a time that I could fit it into my work schedule. Oh well. Once bitten, twice shy.

5. I’m as smart as you

The vast majority of clients are completely clueless when it comes to designing – that’s why they’ve come to an expert. However, not all clients will admit this to themselves, let alone to you.

On the rare occasion that they do, empathise and guide. On the other occasions, it is imperative that the client understands that you are an expert. Your confidence will make the difference between being able to work efficiently or having every action questioned and guided by a novice, extending your project time exponentially.

As far as clients go: being an expert in accounting, manufacturing, or health care doesn’t mean you’re an expert in design – so let us be the designers here – we’re the experts.

6. Can you add in my content?

One more thing

This is another big issue for designers that is easily missed in your project requirements.

We bid for and plan for the creation of a web design. We slice and code a page template (or three), ready for the customer to add in their content. Then we get the files; “Here’s the content for the home page. I’ll send you over the other pages in a few minutes.”

How did this happen? You receive your files as Word documents, so you can’t copy and paste directly into the pages – plus you never signed up for this. You’re a designer and you’ve done the design.

Unfortunately, clients don’t always understand the distinction. They want a web site designing and assume that the final deliverable will be a finished, ready-to-launch site, including content. It is our responsibility to ensure that this assumption is corrected before you begin working.

If not, you’re only leaving yourself open for all the issues that come with content publishing; spelling errors, font layouts and delays in content (see #7).

7. I’ve not written the content yet. I’ll provide it as I do

I warned you!

As savvy designers and developers, we understand that content is king. It keeps your customers coming back, the search engines happy and makes your site look professional and intriguing.

Clients don’t always understand this, in which case you will receive Word documents of sub-par commentary with no direction on what to put where.

If they do understand the concept, that can be worse. Each page optimised for keywords and positioning, which takes time. They send you over one page at a time, with a day between pages – and you’ve got 50 pages to complete!

As with agreeing to upload content, you must agree this process with your writer/client at the start of your project. The client does not need the site designed and coded to write content. Ensure that they start composing content straight away or, alternatively, have them produce the content at a later date and provide all content to you in one go.

There’s nothing worse than copying and pasting a page of text and then having to wait 2-days for your next one!

8. Can you add these images?

This is another assumption that we need to correct at the start of the project: What happens with images supplied by the client?

I once agreed to upload 10 images to a customer’s site as part of their content. It’s only 10 pictures; how hard can it be? Big mistake.

The images were supplied from a digital camera at a resolution of over 2000px square. The image holders were 150×150px. Also, the images were poor quality; bad lighting and exposure meant that they also needed reworking to be used at such small resolutions.

The 10 images took me about 2-hours to rework, rescale and upload to the site. The thank you? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

And this was only a few images. Imagine if you have agreed to upload all content and there were 50. Or 100.

In summary, keep in mind that, like any other profession, you will work with some great people and some not-so-great people.

Most clients aren’t intentionally greedy or nasty, but, make no doubt, they want as much as possible for as little as possible. If you don’t nail these requirements and expectations at the start of the project, your experience will not be as pleasant as we all know freelancing can and should be.

Your goal as a designer should be to provide good service to your clients and get paid a fair rate in return. Since those goals don’t match up, it’s important to learn how to protect yourself and your rights as a designer, because your clients won’t do it for you.

Do you like to wait for pages to download? Neither do your site users. Read on and find out how to speed up that download time…

1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables

CSS downloads faster than tables because:
*  Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content
* Tables appear on the screen all in one go – no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered
* Tables encourage the use of spacer images to aid with positioning
* CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables
* All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer; table layout, stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads
* With CSS you can control the order items download on to the screen – make the content appear before slow-loading images and your site users will definitely appreciate it

To learn more about CSS and the amazing things it can do for your website, check out our CSS resources1 area.

2. Don’t use images to display text

It’s our old friend CSS to the rescue again. There’s no need to use images to display text as so much can be accomplished through CSS. Have a look at this code:

a:link
{
color: #ffffff;
background: #ff9900;
text-decoration: none;
padding: 0.2em;
border: 4px solid;
border-color: #99f #008 #008 #99f
}

a:hover
{
color: #ffffff;
background: #ffaa11;
text-decoration: none;
padding: 0.2em;
border: 4px solid;
border-color: #008 #99f #99f #008
}

This will give you a really simple button that appears to be pushed down when you mouseover it.

3. Call up decorative images through CSS

It’s possible to present images as part of the background, called up through CSS. If you’ve got an image that’s 200px by 100px you can use the following HTML code:

<div class=”pretty-image”></div>

And this CSS:

.pretty-image
{
background: url(filename.gif);
width: 200px;
height: 100px
}

This may at first seem a little pointless but this technique could really improve the download time of your pages. Browsers basically download background images after everything else. By using this technique, your text will load instantaneously and your site users can freely roam about the page while your 50kb fancy image downloads.

This technique disables the ALT attribute though so if you really want to have one then replace the above HTML code with this:

<image src=”spacer.gif” class=”pretty-image” alt=”description” />

Spacer.gif is a 1px x 1px transparent image. Now you have a 50 byte transparent image and the main content loading first, and your great big decorative image, complete with ALT text, loading second. Perfect.

Please note that this technique is only good for decorative images and not informational ones. Any user who has CSS disabled will not be able to see your CSS-embedded images (or their alternative text).

4. Use contextual selectors

This is inefficient:

<p class=”text”>This is a sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is another sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is yet another sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is one more sentence</p>

.text
{
color: #03c;
font-size: 2em
}

Instead of assigning a value to each individual paragraph, we can nest them within a <div> tag and assign a value to this tag:

<div class=”text”>
<p>This is a sentence</p>
<p>This is another sentence</p>
<p>This is yet another sentence</p>
<p>This is one more sentence</p>
</div>

.text p
{
color: #03c;
font-size:2em
}

This second CSS example basically says that every paragraph within class=”text” should be assigned a colour value of #03c and a font size of 2em.

At first glance this doesn’t look too important, but if you can apply this properly throughout your document you can easily knock off 20% of the file size.

You may have noticed the colour values are shorter than normal. #03c is a shortened version of #0033cc – you can assign this abbreviated value to any colour value like this.

5. Use shorthand CSS properties

You can use the following shorthand properties for the margin CSS command.

Use:

margin: 2px 1px 3px 4px (top, right, bottom, left)

…instead of

margin-top: 2px;
margin-right: 1px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 4px

Use:

margin: 5em 1em 3em (top, right and left, bottom)

…instead of

margin-top: 5em;
margin-right: 1em;
margin-bottom: 3em;
margin-left: 1em

Use:

margin: 5% 1% (top and bottom, right and left)

…instead of

margin-top: 5%;
margin-right: 1%;
margin-bottom: 5%;
margin-left: 1%

Use:

margin: 0 (top, bottom, right and left)

…instead of

margin-top: 0;
margin-right: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-left: 0

These rules can be applied to margin, border and padding.

6. Minimise white space, line returns and comment tags

Every single letter or space in your HTML code takes up one byte. It doesn’t sound like much but it all adds up. We’ve found that by working through your page source and eliminating unnecessary white space and comments, you can shave off up to, or even over (if your HTML is really inefficient) 10% of its file size.

7. Use relative call-ups

Try to avoid absolute call ups as they take up more space. An example of an absolute call up is: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/filename.htm”>. Much better would be <a href=”filename.htm”>. But what if some files are in different folders to other ones? Use these shorthand properties:

* <a href=”/”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com
* <a href=”/filename.html”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com/filename.html
* <a href=”/directory/filename.html”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com/directory/filename.html
* <a href=”./”> – Calls up index.html within that directory
* <a href=”../”> – Calls up index.html one directory above
* <a href=”../filename.html”> – Calls up filename.html one directory above
* <a href=”../../”> – Calls up index.html two directories above

8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content

Most META tags are pretty much unnecessary and don’t achieve very much. If you’re interested, you can see a list of META tags that are available in another article. The most important tags for search engine optimisation are the keywords and description tags, although due to mass abuse they’ve lost a lot of importance in recent times. When using these META tags try to keep the content for each under 200 characters – anything more increases the size of your pages. Lengthy META tags are not good for search engines anyway because they dilute your keywords.

9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents

To place CSS in an external document use:

<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”filename.css” />

To place JavaScript in an external document use:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”filename.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Any external file is called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer. Instead of repeating JavaScript or CSS over and over again in HTML files, just write it out once in an external document.

And don’t forget, there’s no limit to the number of these external documents that you can use! For example, instead of making one huge CSS document, have one main one and some others that are specific to certain areas of your site.

10. Use / at the end of directory links

Don’t do this: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/directoryname”>

Do this instead: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/directoryname/”>

Why? If there’s no slash at the end of the URL the server doesn’t know if the link is pointing to a file or to a directory. By including the slash the server instantly knows that the URL is pointing to a directory and doesn’t need to spend any time trying to work it out.

These are all pretty small changes, but difficult to implement after you  have deployed your site.Get it right first, and you’ll reap the benefits!

DM

2. To appear higher in Google’s organic search results, the foremost thing you should do is to remove spider traps, like long URL’s, too much JavaScript, Flash or other rich media on your pages and improper URL redirects. Check your site if it is clearly mapped out for Google (Yahoo!, MSN etc) to get your site indexed easily. You may want to use content lists, like categories or a sitemap too.

3. The file name of the webpage plays a small role in improving the search engine relevance. Using short keywords in the file name not only helps identifying the page content but also improves page relevance for the term. Therefore, it is better to name a page like – http://www.datamouse.biz/blog/wordpress/is-your-site-chrome-compatible/62/ rather than http://www.datamouse.biz/blog/wordpress/Page?page=62. Also, make sure you use hyphens ‘-’ between keywords instead of underscores ‘_’. Google considers hyphen as a space and underscores as a merged single word.

4. Avoid using subdomains unless absolutely necessary as search engines often treat them as a separate domain and limit the pass-through of the trust value of your main site to it.

5. Make sure to mention your geographical information like your real world address on your pages. This information should be included in HTML so that the spiders can read and distinguish it. Modern bots are looking for area codes, zip codes and city names to assist their Search Engine users in locating stores and services near their location. This will provide you a competitive advantage when someone searches for your business.

6. If for some reason, you have no option other than using flash, there is something called Macromedia SDK that helps search engines to understand what the page (or website) is about as it helps the bots to crawl through the flash page. You may also want to add more keyword rich content in ‹NOEMBED› tags.

7. Don’t just rely on a single way, for Search Engines to index your website. Most importantly, you must put link to new pages on your site map. Update your Google site map every time you add a new page. If there’s a corresponding page on your site that you can use to link to the new page, do so. Don’t forget to mention your new page on your blog. In case of blogs, ping Google, Yahoo, technorati, etc every time you post a blog.

8. It always helps your ranking to have a keyword in your domain name, given that you have strong internal and external linking for the same keyword. If you have useful content on your website, people will link to your website using your domain name as anchor text (which carries your keyword), so your ranking for that keyword will improve. But even if you don’t have a keyword in your domain name, there’s no need to worry as the off page factors contribute to rankings. For e.g. consider Adobe, it is the top result out of 3 billion results for the keyword phrase “click here”. This is because of the off-page factors, and not owing to presence (or absence) of “click here” in Adobe’s domain name.

9. You must pay attention while writing the title and description for your website. Your page may only be ranking number 5 or 6 on Search Engines, but if you’ve taken enough time to create an enticing title and description for all your pages, you may still manage to earn the same CTR as the one sitting on the number one spot. Similarly, a website ranking number one for a keyword might have a poor CTR if the webmaster hasn’t put in enough thought while writing the website’s title and description.

10. Anchor text is one of the best places to insert your keyword phrases. Go through your website and look for phrases like ‘Click here for a quote’, ‘Click here for more information’ etc. Suppose ‘Click here for a mortgage loan quote’ or ‘Click here for more Denver coffee shop information’. But make sure the entire sentence is a link or if not, at least make the keyword phrase a link.

11. If you are serious about doing a long term online business, don’t engage yourself in black hat SEO practices. Even though they can give you short term Search Engine advantage but will hurt you badly in long term:

• Don’t use hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or lightning fast java redirects.
• Don’t load up your pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

12. At SMX, all of the engineers from all the search engines made a statement that 301 redirect will not carry the full effect if the content of the redirecting website is topically not the same. We should avoid redirecting our website to a site which is topically irrelevant to our website. For e.g. if you are planning to redirect (301) your website about cars, then you should not redirect it to a website selling watches. An inappropriate redirect will not lead to any benefit to your website.

13. Dumping new content on your website in one go is not such a good idea from the search engine’s point of view. Make sure that you consistently add new posts and articles on a regular basis. This will not only increase the bot crawl frequency of your website, but will also result in frequent repeated traffic.

14. For an optimized body copy, it is extremely important for a website to not only have the most important keywords, but it must also read well naturally. Modern search engines use artificial intelligence (called Latent Symentic Indexing), that is a measure of how well the supporting content and text match to the theme of the website. So there is no point of wasting your time on keyword stuffing anymore; instead you must look to refine the content as much as possible.

15. Did you know that on May 12, Google announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners to grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. It helps you to attract more visitors, enrich your site with social features and the best part is that you need no programming skills whatsoever to use Friend Connect on your site.

16. If you want to make sure that Search Engines index each and every link on your website, you may want to add a link to your sitemap on every important new page that you create on your website. This not only improves the Search Engine Indexing but also also consolidates the internal linking of your website.

17. Followed by the red carpet seomoz Web 2.0 awards 2008 was the ‘.0′ update from Google when Google decided to deindex the seomoz web 2.0 award page just because the URL of the page ended up with a ‘.0′. The page earlier used to rank number one for semoz web 2.0 awards but as the back link weightage shifted from ‘web2.0/’ to ‘web 2.0′, Google picked up the latter and decided to unindex it as Google internally uses ‘.0′ extensions to recognize the files they don’t want to follow. So here is a new way how you can hide your pages from Google – simply end up the URL with ‘.0′. It works.

18. When your search engine rankings fluctuate, or even if your site drops from the rankings, don’t panic. Understand that these things happen in this industry, and they WILL happen to you. What you DON’T want to do is make any changes to your web pages because of fluctuations in the rankings or because your site drops out of the rankings. Step back and wait to see what happens- monitor your rankings, watch the industry and read the news. In all likelihood, your pages will reappear right back where they should be (or close to those rankings), if you haven’t done anything wrong (such as using spam). Fluctuations in rankings are normal. Far too many people panic in the short term, when they would be wiser to just take it easy and not start making changes so quickly.

19. While you are optimizing a page for a specific phrase, think about why a searcher used that specific phrase. If you are optimizing a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page, are you delivering your most frequently asked questions? Think of the circumstances that might lead an individual to search for certain specific phrases like:
“infant pillow support” (Would this attract parents of newborn babies?)
“Meaning of babies names” (Would this attract “soon to be” parents?)

20. Discover Your Competitors: It’s a fact that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

DM