Cephalopod

What a ghastly experience, sorry you had to go through that! They do exist, these people, and it's usually the ones who are already getting a very good deal. Sort of repeating what others have said for the most part, but there may be some original nuggets: Clear process, outlined in steps, in the initial proposal. A nice form to gather nuances of the spec up front, along with all the other stuff they need to supply (branding, content, product data etc). Clear, limited milestones for client feedback, not whenever an idea pops into their head. I literally have them fill out a form and upload an document of amendments at the Amendments step. Random emails get the response "That sounds like a good idea! Make sure you include that in the document, I think you're onto something." Never show work in progress: build to the initial spec to completion, at least to your own satisfaction, and only then let them take a look. Gather amendments in a formalised way, process those, then let them look again. There's a reason restaurants don't invite you into the kitchen to offer directions to the chef while they're cooking your meal. Some people have cashflow problems. Rather than admit it and ask to put the project on ice for a bit while they sort it out, they'll deliberately waste your time to kick the can down the road, often destroying their own website in the process. So don't charge the final payment at the end. You could either split the payment to have some percentage up front, and the rest going in to the amendments phase, or do some kind of direct debit payment plan where the money comes out each month regardless of whether they want to faff about or not. Sticking to the above has helped me a lot and at the very least, if people ignore or try to break out of that process, gives me a great excuse to fire them politely.

This was for a bit of fun. Fair warning: it'll play horrible music at you. I had to do a talk at a networking event and used the time to gather the WORST ideas from the audience: all the things they hated the most about a bad user experience, for a fictional business of their own creation. They decided they wanted to be a felt bicycle company called Softly Spoken Bicycle Tailored Solutions (dot Biz). With the promise, of course, that I'd go away and build it for them. Their ideas included but aren't limited to: music that plays and can't be stopped totally unresponsive AI slop/stocky images everywhere of people shaking hands and looking businessy pointless, animated shapes snow a countdown timer overly complicated enquiry forms that don't work (it has a small chance of wiping what you've put in a previous field when you move on to the next one) inconsistent colours and fonts Enjoy: https://client-view.co.uk/softlyspoken/

Oh cool, thanks! Just downloaded it and am having a muck about - it sounds like it might be a good intermediate step

It's useful for creating stand-in content for clients if they don't want to pay for a copywriter, which it's then up to them to correct and edit, so you aren't waiting on them for months to deliver content. That's helped me a lot to get jobs over the line. I've also found it useful for organising chaotic information or doing otherwise very tedious formatting. A PDF of their terms and conditions needs converting to HTML with loads of nested lists for example. I've tried getting it to write code, experimentally, but I don't rate it for this. I found you need to be so specific about the logic you want it to follow that you're basically writing whatever function you're trying to get out of it yourself, just in clumsy English. Otherwise it goes off on some mad, irrelevant path. Might have improved a bit since I tried it but it wasn't that long ago.

Hi there, I'm a web developer in Bristol with a little agency doing websites and web maintenance for small businesses. I've worked pretty much exclusively with WordPress since about 2018 - for the sake of standardisation - but used to manage sites in other systems as well and just recently I've been looking into re-learning Drupal for some more complicated membership-type builds... you can do this sort of thing in WordPress too but it involves a lot more duct tape and chewing gum, particularly if you want to keep members out of the wp-admin area altogether. Anyway, I like meeting/caffeinating/playing D&D with other web people IRL and I've always found there's a lot of ways to help one another. In a general effort to do more of that, lo-and-behold, found your forum Nice to meet you guys! Anyone has any advice/resources on getting to grips with Drupal it'd be much appreciated, and I'm happy to help with anything relating to WordPress, bog standard CSS/HTML/PHP stuff. Or going both ways, just business stuff - managing clients and that sort of thing. Looking forward to getting to know some of you.