We’ve all heard the old adage, “The customer is always right.” From time to time there is push back from frustrated designers and developers suggesting heresy; the customer is, in fact, fallible. We must be at this part in the cycle because I’ve seen several blog posts lately regarding how the customer isn’t always right and what to do about it. Aside from the obviousness of it — that no one is always right — trying to assign right or wrong to the situation doesn’t address the core of the issue – avoiding confrontation with the client.

The best way I have found to avoid confrontation with clients while remaining in a position to guide website projects is to bring the client into the project team. Here are some tips to accomplish that:

First round draft picks
Putting the client on the project team sounds like a given, but many managers forget to inform them of this during the kick-off call. They just assume the client knows. I would coach you to lay out your team structure during the first call and reinforce it as often as applicable. Continually use the pronoun “we.” Make sure they understand that their participation, not just cooperation, is key to the project’s success.

The starting line-up
You can’t profess to someone they’re on the team if you leave them on the bench. The first reaction to assigning the client work may be, “But, isn’t that what they’re paying us for?” They’re paying you to launch a website, and no worries. You’ll be doing the heavy lifting. Tasks perfect for the client include providing style guide and logo files, reviewing and reporting on analytics, setting up merchant accounts, providing feedback, etc. If you attempt to shoulder the entire project, you risk alienating your client. Keep them engaged.

Be a heavy hitter
The important differentiation here is to be an expert going into a project, not just say you are once it starts. Check your ego at the door.

One surefire way to demonstrate this to the client is by backing up claims by citing sources. No one expects you to know everything, and you’re better off giving credit where credit is due. Another way is with empirical data. Numbers may paint pictures, but they rarely lie.

The All Stars
Establish the rest of your team as experts, too. This is another reason to leave ego out of this, because even if they are your employees, the other team members have valuable insight and specialties. Graphic designers know aesthetics, UI designers know information architecture, and programmers know how to make everything work.

Never throw one of your team members under the bus. It’s important that your team is disciplined enough not to enter debates with the client, but if a point is contested; you can do irreparable harm by not backing them up. Your best bet is to immediately follow up your team member’s comment with agreement and additional support before the client counters. If they are wrong, handle it privately, and let them document the correction. Never reprimand them in front of the client. Some enjoy this because it boosts their individual authority, but all you’ll do is undermine your team.

The more the client perceives you and your team to be experts, the more likely it is they will listen.

Play to their strengths
Your client is an expert, too. It’s your job to tap into it. There are several areas of expertise they likely bring to the table, including their customers, sales cycle, competitors, and company goals. Elevate them if they don’t take initiative to do so. Their information is critical.

Have a big locker room
If your client consistently invites other people from their company onto calls or email chains, start looking for ways to bring them into the team. Utilize their colleagues, subordinates and even their boss. The more they contribute, the more it feels like your client is on a team. They’ll reinforce each other and act as built in reminders. If it’s your client’s boss in the picture, you may not want to assign them much to do, but be clear that you respect their opinion and insight. Provide concise, to-the-point status updates and paint a positive picture. Reinforce that they made a good decision when they approved hiring you. Always make your client look good to their boss.

Go pro
Be dependable, positive and a good listener.

Many ultra talented designers don’t have a solid foundation of business basics. You must communicate well, oral and written. Do you want clients to perceive you as “right”? Start by being dependable and not dropping the ball on anything. Avoid making careless errors; deliver your milestones on time like wire frames and development sites, and embrace the QA process. Mistakes serve as distractions.

As hard as it is sometimes, stay positive. Your attitude can undermine you. No one wants to listen to a Negative Nancy, and they will begin to tune you out. This means you have to learn how to handle critiques.

Being pro also means listening. If you want your client to listen to you and value your words when you speak, you should do that for them first.

Sometimes you strike out
Regarding receiving recommendations, I’ve often heard people say the worst a client can do is say “no”. I beg to differ. The worst they can do is stop paying you. That doesn’t make the client right, but it does mean you have to be gracious. You can do everything right, have all the best supporting evidence, and the client still may say no. If they reject an idea, you have to lead by example, even if that means you need a couple minutes to regroup. You should never “pick a hill you are willing to die on,” because Cufon font replacement or JavaScript drop down menus are the most important thing ever. If that’s your mindset, you’ve already lost.

Put your heart into it
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “Sincerity is everything. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” If you believe that, chances are you consider most of this blog post a waste of your time. That belief will only get you so far. As a team leader, you need to get involved in projects at a deep level. In many cases a simple way to do this is through research, listening, and understanding. Once you reach that point, you can honestly start recommendations with, “If this were my site, I would…” When that happens, clients tend to listen. You can’t really teach someone to care, but you can encourage it and hire team members that are capable of it.

The trophy
Bring a client into the team requires tact, patience and finesse. Much like Web design itself, this process can be raised, like a trophy, to an art form. Follow these suggestions well and you’ll face fewer and fewer “The client is always right” losing battles.

Building a Championship Web Team with the Client is a post by SEO expert Mike Benson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

There are many ways to screw up a web development project, and it all starts with not helping the sales managers.

You got this one
When you’re working for a studio, web development projects are team efforts. That team includes your sales staff; they’re the front line. Here’s some tips on selling them out and getting things off to a bad start.

Skip the meetings
After the sales lead comes in, usually a meeting is set up to talk about the project. Go ahead and skip that meeting. It’s highly unlikely that any thing important will be discussed, such as their goals, target audience, and metrics for success. Even if it were discussed, you certainly don’t need this information first hand. Why make informed decisions and recommendations for the project when you can make assumptions and propose template solutions.

Send a questionnaire
Now that you’ve skipped the sales meeting, it’s time to cut corners on the analysis. Nothing spells personalized customer service like a lengthy questionnaire. Be sure to lead off with simple questions to boost their confidence, like their company name and URL. This proves to them that even if the sales person already got this information, you’re just being thorough. More importantly, ask really hard questions that require essays for answers as well as significant research into their sales numbers and web analytics. Customers like to jump through hoops. They probably have nothing better to do with their time any ways.

Copy Paste
Proposals are easy. Just have the sales guy copy some text from the last couple your company sent out and paste it into a new file. Make sure to change the date on the cover and footers. Most importantly, have sales just recycle the last estimate that sounds about right.

Don’t approve the estimate
The proposal is ready to send to the customer, you should review and approve it, right? No, but I can see why you’d think that. You need plausible deniability and a scape goat if something goes wrong. Practice saying, “I dunno what sales was thinking, they just sent it out like that before I saw it”. So, go ahead and be committed to the estimate and time line in the document. It’s probably close enough.

It’s important that the client has expectations for the project and you don’t know what they are. That keeps it interesting.

Send comps
When the customer asks for three or four samples of possible home page designs for their new site, oblige them. Without a proper discovery process, its a shot in the dark, but it’s sooo worth it. They might like yours. Don’t let not understanding how they want the site to work, the target audiences needs, or even what content you’re working with hold you back. Guess.

Have a poor contract
That mumbo jumbo at the end of the proposal probably won’t ever come into play. Go ahead and use lines like “the final payment is due after approval” and see how long it takes before a client realizes the loop hole. Besides, intellectual property rights and limitations of warranties and liabilities are just fancy words that lawyers use.

Take any project
Why be picky when you’re awesome. Your solution can fit any company. You especially want the clients that have a tight budget, pressing deadlines, and a spec that only has one phase. Typically, the client can pick two out of three; cost, time line and scope. As the design and development studio, you get the third pillar of the project. That’s just being greedy, and you’re better off letting them control everything. It’s best to never think about which client’s problems best fit you’re studios skill set and expertise.

Now that you realize you’re in a world of hurt, it’s time to look back at the questionnaire and proposal and start pointing fingers. Maybe you don’t “got this one”, but there’s always next time.

We’ve all made some mistakes. What have you done or seen done by others that’s a sure fire way to screw up a project?

How to Screw Up a Web Project – During the Sale is a post by SEO expert Mike Benson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I’ve had my new Motorola Droid from Verizon for about 24 hours and here is my initial review.

The Honeymoon

The sky is a little bluer, the sun feels a little warmer, the air smells a little cleaner. The romantic babble has almost reached peak nauseousness; “who’s the best phone, you’re the best phone, I love my new phone.” Yeah it’s a little sickening unless you’re a gadget geek.

Game Changing

A popular term with roots in athletics for when a critical play occurs that has the potential to effect the outcome of the game, like in last years Super Bowl when the Steeler’s Harrison ran a 100 yard interception return for a touchdown to close-out the first half. The term is now popular in the business world too. That is, in fact, what this phone is for me.

Being a fallen Apple fan boy, I never got an iPhone because I decided years ago to pay less for computers and I didn’t want to sign up with AT&T. Even though Verizon offers a variety of Blackberrys, I passed on all of them as well. For me, the Droid is a giant leap in a better direction. I am by no means a gadget expert, but I’ll share some of my initial thoughts.

The Pros

Mail

I have several Gmail accounts; not @gmail mind you, but personal (at cherryred dot org) and professional (at seo dot com) emails that are run through Gmail. It is ridiculously easy to manage multiple emails on this phone. Tap the email icon, tap menu, tap accounts and all of your email accounts are listed along with the number of new, unread messages. Simply tap the account you wish to see the inbox for. The interface is extremely responsive, so we’re talking no time at all to toggle email accounts.

Social Media

I can look at my Twitter stream in one tap. I can get to Facebook in one tap, but it takes a second to view the stream. I don’t think it could be faster unless it read my mind, which is probably Android 4.0.

Phone

Oh, that’s right, it’s a phone. Call quality is great. Voice activated dialing. Not a single complaint on the phone. Only minor issue I had was with my contact list. For some reason it imported some people “last name, first name” and others “first name, last name” so now I have to go in and edit a number of contacts.

Market

I’ve already downloaded a few apps like Twidroid, Bank of America, and Weather Channel to name a few. All super fast downloads and installs. Nothing took more than seconds from tap to use.

Maps

Not much to say here without a picture, but the integrated Google Maps is brilliant and beautifully functional. You won’t need a separate GPS.

Video

The video quality is great.

All the small things

There are too many to list. I know I haven’t found them all, but there are a lot of little things that just make the phone a pleasure to use. The on-screen keyboard is responsive and perhaps more accurate than my fingers would have thought. One push of a button on the top of the phone and you can instantly lock the screen and put it in sleep mode. One more click, then rotary style “swoosh” of your finger and it’s active again. I’ve gotten my share of pocket dials and sent plenty too. I don’t think I’ll be making any pocket dials this time. The main “back, menu, home, search” buttons at the bottom of the phone are pairs with a tenth of a second light vibration to confirm you pushed it. I like that kind of interface feedback. There is a screen for battery life that shows each line item and what percent of the battery it’s consuming so you can fine-tune your usage. I digress.

The Cons

This is a short list. I can’t tether it to my laptop yet. The camera software doesn’t seem to consistently focus, which combined with a bit of a delay made for several deleted pics already. However, it seems that if you use the on screen “take picture” icon instead of the button on the side of the phone, it’s noticeably more responsive. I haven’t had enough time to test this out completely. Not sure I like this hard, clear acrylic case accessory that doesn’t seem to get along 100% with the slide out keyboard. I may trade it in for the soft shell case. That might bother me the most since I’m always holding it. Only other issue is I haven’t figured out how to get my PC to recognize it*. All in all, nothing that can’t be fixed, or won’t be possible with future updates.

Summary

The new Droid is worth every penny and I suspect a few months from now I will still feel that way. I will now go back to ocean front beach chair, basking in the sun, sipping a fruity drink with an umbrella.

(* update – now that I’ve had 5 mins to try to get it connected to my computer, it is. Plug it in via the USB cable, drag down the notification bar on the phone, and click “mount”. Easy, but I have read of people with Vista 64-bit issues even though that’s what I have.)

Motorola Droid-The Honeymoon is a post by SEO expert Mike Benson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Ten years ago, websites were largely brochure-ware and widely considered disposable. It was not uncommon for a company to roll out a new website annually. Eliminating waste is a popular topic these days, and many companies are employing strategies to get the most out of their online budgets.

Today, it is not uncommon for a website to last years. Companies are stretching their dollars by investing early and adopting the process of steady, ongoing improvements.

Spending time and money early in the life-cycle of your website has greater impact on your business’ success. Not only do the decisions you make have longer shelf life, but the process is also cheaper at this stage.

Set a winning strategy

Good web development teams approach your project with purpose.

You’ll want to reach a deep understanding of your company, your brand, and the target audience; run through a competitive analysis to set the playing field; and outline your online strategies and how they fit into your overall corporate mission. Many refer to this as the discovery phase, and essentially this is when the team does its homework. These are all great investments of your time.

The result is you will get better recommendations on what creative and technical tactics will best support your goals, meet your objectives, attack your competitor’s strengths and exploit their weaknesses.

Rally the troops

This is the time to get opinions from within your company. Before the first pixel of your website is onscreen, there will be consensus on what the team is setting out to do and why. The value of later choices will be measured against these early decisions. This will save waste, therefore minimizing costs. Anyone who opts out of participating in these early stages of web development shouldn’t get to cast votes during beta testing. If they’d like, they can cheer lead from the sidelines.

The storm before the calm

You’ve got the team dressed. You know your opponent’s playbook. The excitement in the locker room is palatable. But, you’re not ready to charge out and take the field. It’s time to wire frame the most important pages on your website and storyboard technical components. Planning is critical. Would you live in a house erected by an architect who built it without blueprints? Would you be confident enough to drive a car that rolled down an assembly line without plans?

At this point in the process, change is rapid and cheap. Figuratively speaking, it’s only on paper. Think, get opinions and feedback, work and rework ideas, explore options, and make changes as until the team is satisfied. Approving a wire frame or storyboard is not a point of no return, but it is the last time “what if…” and “hey, what about…” are cheap questions to answer.

It’s all over but the shouting.

Now it’s time to build without second guessing yourself. The team already knows the site is being built correctly, so any change will be minor. The development environment is not the cheapest place for change, but it is cheaper than fixing the live site in a panic. Additionally, any major change will negatively impact the budget and time line. Since you’re already planning on iterative improvements, major changes can be built into the game plan for later phases, or simply avoided.

As exciting as launching the site will be, for some it will be anticlimactic.

Ok, more shouting.

Once your site is built correctly, you can minimize your website expenses and concentrate your efforts on marketing and promotion. This is where the money rightfully should be spent in order to maximize your revenue. You can confidently drive traffic into your sales engine, knowing it’s built to win.

The road to relevance

New websites are no longer the key to being perceived as fresh and relevant. Today, we know that’s the responsibility for writers, bloggers and marketers and in many cases consumers themselves as we engage in two-way conversations.

Learn from the examples of some of today’s web giants, like Amazon.com and Apple. I bet you can’t remember the last time you saw a major change on either site. Both have effectively looked the same for years, but, I bet they made small improvements last week. The best websites don’t need to be redesigned unless their purpose changes.

Change is cheapest at the beginning of the process, and progressively gets more expensive. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to invest early and make improvement a steady, iterative process. After the foundation is set, you study metrics, analyze conversions, and act accordingly. Very rarely do you make a mistake through this system of checks and balances, let alone one you can’t recover from quickly. This approach is better for your brand, your budget and your customers.

Invest Early in Your Website to Save Money is a post by SEO expert Mike Benson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.