II DALTON II

Looks like I am just gonna have to be hard on them and put my foot down. They called my mother this morning and gave her a load of **** over the phone. This is the last time I do a favour like this for anyone I think.

I made a website for someone I know last year and I have been pestered by this person on a fairly regular basis since. About once a month or so they contact me complaining that their google ranking has changed. Now when I first made it the website was first page for all the search terms and keywords they wanted. As time has went by thought they have been slipping and I think the main reason is that they do not promote the website at all. They are a bit computer/internet illiterate and when I bring up the subject of them promoting it themselves they kick up a big fuss and tell me I had better do it for them since they paid me to make the site. So I am stuck in this situation where I am basically being emotionally bullied into working on their site free of charge indefinately to bring in traffic. I am near breaking point with this last call from them basically telling me that "it had better be 1st page again" by the end of January. I have no written contract since this was done as a favour last year and I only charged £150 for a 5 page site with gallery, contact form etc. I reckon I have put around 200 hours into the site so far and they just take me for granted. If anyone has been in a similar situation I would be very grateful to hear how you resolved it.

Finished the site this evening and they have agreed with the sum. Feels good to have it all done and definately something I can use in a portfolio.

Well my quote for them is a one off deal because they are family. I wouldn't do this kind of deal for any other client. I've emailed them with my quote and explained this to them so they won't mention the price to anyone who may enquire. Instead they will jsut pass my contact details onto them.

Cheers for the comments guys. I've just uploaded the gallery now, just got to add descriptions to the images and then link the FB button with their facebook page once they've made one.

My client is my Uncle and he insisted that he pay me, and no we're not exactly close. Think I have met him maybe 5 or 6 times over the course of my life. I agree the relation makes pricing a little more difficult for me. I don't want my own family to think I have overcharged or anything.

Thanks for all the replies, some good advice here that I will heed in future. I started making the site in HTML/CSS just using Notepad ++ and Paintshop Pro for the images. In future I think I will use a CMS such as wordpress or Joomla though just to save time and limit errors in the coding. I'm currently working on a gallery for them and things are buggy at the moment. Gotta admit I am a bit stressed about this site, it's the first time I have made one for someone else. In the past I have only made 4 websites for myself and they took a while due to my lack of experience in web development and coding. So far this is the site, I ended up implementing a foxyform for now until I can get my own contact form working properly. Also the client has not made a facebook page yet so the link at the top does not work yet. This should be sorted by this evening. I'm thinking about sticking to the £150 idea and adding that I will review/tweak keywords and phrases in a few months if the site has not ranked that well in the search engines. What do you think?

So I have been asked to design a website for a relative and they have offered to pay me. They want 4 pages in total. A home page, a page listing their services, a gallery page of past projects and a contact page with contact form. I was thinking perhaps £50 for the homepage and template, £25 for each page after that and then £25 for the implementation of a gallery and contact form. Total £150 fair for a small 4 page website? There is no e-commerce or anything like that, basically a portfolio website. What do you reckon? Am I in the right ballpark or would you charge more/less?

Wow! I submitted a "Support Ticket" about 20 mins ago. I was expecting it to take a few days. Cheers for all your help in whittling it down. Must have been a mistake on their end

I purchased it through Just Host. I've used them for a while now and had no problems at all until now.

I have a PDF invoice with the address on it confirming that I now own it. I also have an email confirming that it has been registered. Do you think it is a probelm with my hosting company?

I recently put together a simple little website to host some flash games. It is focused around 1 particular game at the moment but me and a few buddies intend to add games we made ourselves to it in the future. All is well design wise as everything is working fine. The problem came when I went to upload it to our server. I bought the domain "pandemic-2.com" and added it to our CPanel list of sites. The website appears the same as the other add on domains that we have (files correctly named, root folder specified etc). We uploaded all our content to the root folder but when we typed in the address we get the following message. "www.pandemic-2.com is unavailable or may not exist" Any ideas as to what it could be?

Thank you, I just did it now.

Turns out it was a server issue and all is fine now. How do I turn off indexing for my image folders etc though?

Thanks Adam, I'll double check all of my sources for th image files. For reference the site is supposed to look like this.