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Every freelancer has high-maintenance clients, it comes with the territory. There comes a time in the life of your business, that in order to grow you have to cut ties with old clients to make room for the new.

First let’s draw some boundaries. There are a lot of difficult people out there who need a lot of hand-holding, but this does not make them immediately expendable.  If you’re having problems with a client, it’s best for you to explain what the problem is and work for a solution.

Really bad things:

There are some actions that can be considered completely unacceptable, here are a few.

Not Paying
This goes without saying: If they stop paying, you stop working

Spec Work
It doesn’t matter how cool it will look in your portfolio, don’t do it. You’re a professional and have worked hard to get there. If you set the precedent that you will work for free it will be expected on ever project going forward.

Abusive behavior
Everyone gets stressed out from time to time so some frustration is acceptable. What is not acceptable is a mean or threatening client. Little threats will lead to bigger ones down the road, don’t give in.

Troubling behavior:

There are some red flags that might not be grounds for immediately releasing a client but they are factors to take into consideration before working with them again.

Paying late:
Waiting 30 days for payment is a standard amount of time. If a client is habitually late, it’s a sign they don’t respect you and your work. It could also be a sign that your client is in financial trouble.

Work outside the scope of the proposal:
A good clear proposal will keep, what is often referred to as “Scope Creep”, in check and allow you to add to the estimate as the project grows. Other things to keep track of are time spent on the phone, writing explanatory emails, needless revisions and traveling to unnecessary meetings. Be sure to articulate what the deliverables will be as well as what each task entails.

You’re the scapegoat
Freelancers often take the blame for failed projects since they are not in the office to defend themselves. This also hurts your reputation. Taking the fall when you’ve done nothing wrong is big red flag. You might want to get out before you are kicked out.

Annoyances:

Sometimes valuable clients are frustrating to deal with. They might pay well or you might be getting some really good portfolio pieces.  Here are some concerns that may not warrant ditching your client but could be used to bolster your argument.

It’s just bad work
A very wise designer once told me that his best advertising is a successful project. If you’re being asked to make changes that degrade the quality of your work then you may be better off looking for clients that will improve your portfolio.

Disorganization
Last second or immediate requests are a killer. They not only take away from the quality of your work but they also disrupt the time lines of your other projects.

Working in a vacuum
Often times unnecessary changes and obstacles come from unseen bosses. If your working for a contact within an organization it’s a good idea to get to know the people your contact works with so your not left with a handful of unfinished projects when they head for greener pastures.

Turning down better work
If you are turning down better work to fulfill obligations to a bad client it’s time to reassess your priorities.

I’m ready to do it.

“I’m going to fire my client, how should I do it?” One word, PROFESSIONALLY. It’s common sense, I know, but at the end of a draining project frustration can build up. As  mentioned above, it’s best to communicate problems with your client as they come up instead of letting them linger. Your client shouldn’t be blindsided by your decision. Don’t forget, clearly communicate why you are choosing to discontinue work with them.

Avoiding emails or phone calls will put more stress on you.  Be upfront.  Come up with one good reason (ie: I’m losing money on these projects or I’m not happy with the quality of work I’m doing and I’m not a good fit for your company). Be ready to give examples but don’t bring up a laundry list of grievances, only bring up points relevant to your primary reason.

Things to keep in mind:

Try to finish the project you’re working on.
You don’t want to get a reputation of being someone who bails at the first sign of trouble. Bad news spreads quick. In some cases you might be bound by a contract, so be sure you are fulfilling that contract.

Burning bridges
Letting go of a long time client may leave some hurt feelings. We are professionals but we are also people and rejection stings. You will probably burn that bridge; so be certain you’re ready to defend this decision because you’ll probably never be able to go back.

This is my last post about my blog, I swear. I thought it was important to share since I’ve gone back and forth on the issue a lot in the last week or so. This site now breaks in Internet Explorer 6. It breaks pretty bad too. And further more, I don’t care.

I’m not the only one. When it’s safe to stop supporting IE6 has been an ongoing debate for a while but up until recently I’ve been hesitant to stop designing for it. It’s always been to large an audience to turn my back on. One of the things I paid the most attention to while redesigning was how people were using my blog. How did they navigate? what other pages did they go to? I also looked at their monitor resolution and browser type. On average about 10% of my audience uses IE6, that’s lower than most sites. I also looked at how these people found my site. A lot of it wasn’t core audience traffic but folks who were searching for something completely different and came upon my blog.

I should point out all the client sites I build will still support IE6 fully, but this is my personal site so I can run it however I darn please. I also know I’m putting out some really good people (sorry Beth) who are stuck on IE6 at work.

What do you guys think? Is it a good move? Bad move? Completely arrogant?

Last week I launched my refreshed blog. It looks a whole lot like the old one and if you’ve only been on the site a few times you would probably never notice anything changed. A couple people were asking if I had any before and after images to show the difference. I have full size images on Flickr, click on the thumbnails to see them larger.

Here it is. The last few months I’ve been working to rewrite the Wordpress template for my blog. This version of my site launched last June and has served me well. At the time I was just getting my feet wet with CSS based layouts so there was a lot lacking. I was also just getting a feel for Wordpress and PHP.

So this spring I felt like it was time to get Wordpress looking as good as I had originally envisioned. I also wanted to get a fresh look at the blog based on how people actually used it.

My site has two audiences. The first and by far the largest are the folks who visit to read the this here blog. In the year this site has been up and running I’ve noticed very few people who come in to the blog go anywhere else. When they do they go to the portfolio and once and a while they go to the contact or home page. The second audience comes through search engine traffic or through links on other sites. Those people hit my home page and seldom check out the blog.

These audience have very different reasons for visiting. The blog crowd wants content, the home pagers are looking for a service or are looking to learn more about Colbow Design. The home page is designed to show off my work and get then to either the blog or portfolio. So with that in mind I ditched the old navigation for the blog, it was just taking up space. I also put some meaningful content along the sidebar of the site. To do that I had to move the archive that used to live on the sidebar.

Did someone mentione the archive? That two year sprall of old blog posts. It was time to rethink that as well, it was getting way to long. Most folks don’t search the archives so I moved it down to the footer and put it in a dropdown. I also put the categories and blogroll down there.

The other things I added were simple. Jocob Cass recomended an RSS feed to track comments on a blog post. That feature existed but since he couldn’t find it it that means I did a crappy job designing it. I also added Gravatars to the site. No real reason for those to be there, I just think they are cool and help personalize the comments a bit.

Another feature recomended by a couple folks (Craig Minch, Brendaan Cullen) requested a preview box on the comments so they could proof the comment before commiting it. I’ve never been a big fan of comment previews so Instead I added the ability to edit your comment for 30 minutes after posting it. I figured that was a good compromise feature.

A few weeks ago I found myself in an unusual situation. Unusual for me anyway. I was saying no to a project that I really wanted to work on. Now that my young business has found its footing I’m figuring out what projects I can really excel at and which ones aren’t such a good fit. You usually get a read pretty quick on what projects are a good fit with a phone call. Then I can weed out the ones that are too big, time consuming or just don’t play to my strengths.

So back to my unusual situation. I received a call from some developers in Chicago who were looking for some help for a series of ecommerce sites they were working on. Each site would have roughly the same design but the sites would be differentiated by color. I’ve been doing something similar with Brad Dielman (pronounced Deel-Mang) over the last few months. While collaborating we had started playing around with transparent PNGs and swapping out just the background colors to so we could use the same image for each color. It was Brad’s idea but it got me thinking about how I could really leverage it in future designs. So when these guys called and explained what they wanted to do I got pretty excited.

So if you have a good client and a good concept of what you want to do, why say no?  They had a tight budget to work with. That didn’t stop me, I’m willing to take something on for a lower hourly rate if it’s interesting work. The problem was time. They wanted a great looking design and I wanted to do it, but they needed all the designs within 2 weeks (no HTML, just PSDs). That’s doable, but it is pretty tight.

When I started putting together a statement of work and looking over my scedule everything would have to happen perfectly to hit the deadline. If things didn’t go perfectly then I would have to push back on an existing clients schedule to fit everything it. Since it’s work being done at a lower rate I had to start thinking hard about if I really wanted to do that.

There is an old model that anyone in the creative industry is familiar with, Time over Money over Quality. You can choose two of those three things (Time, Money or Quality). You can have it fast and you can have it cheap but it’s not going to be triple A quality. I realized that for this project I didn’t have the time and money to really do what I really wanted.  Since that’s why I was excited for the project I had to write the guys the next day and explain that I had to pass on the project.

June’s Cleveland Web Standards Association meeting is changing it up a little bit. We have moved out of our comfortable digs at Tri-C for the summer and have set up shop at American Greeting. This months presentation is by Chris Caputo The Director of Acquisition Marketing at (of all places) American Greetings. Chris will be talking about search engine optimization and the role web standards play in the process. Check out the CWSA site for more details and to register (it’s free).

This is a little off topic, more marketing than design. Just today Papa Johns is selling large pizza’s in the greater Cleveland area for only 23 cents. It has something to do with insulting LeBron James, you can read about it if you’re interested. They are selling the pizzas so cheaply to make up for a marketing gaffe last week when they insulted the basketball fans of Cleveland. It’s been fun to follow the pizza story online today. People from all over town are buzzing about it. Here are some of the things overheard on Twitter:

DJLitten: For those thinking about getting Papa John’s $.23 pizza in CLE today, some already have 200+ people in line and it doesn’t open until 11 am.

AngeloMandato: Trying to order a PapaJohns 23 cent pizza, line is busy

jason_z: My coworkers have already started dialing Papa Johns. Phone is busy. I feel bad for the people working for them today.

bethdean: At Papa John’s in Shaker Heights there were 1,785 people in line for 23 cent pizza. Seriously?

I decided to make pizza for lunch instead, I hate waiting in lines. Everyone I hates waiting in line. Papa Johns has done a great job drumming up all sorts of publicity for the event. They arranged this to make up for a mistake they made by insulting LeBron James. Not a bad idea but I think the execution is terrible. People waiting in lines for hours? You can’t place orders over the phone? That’s a bad user experience. A bad user experience that will be associated with the Papa Johns brand. What if someone wants something other than a one topping pizza but can’t get through? They might try another chain and find out that they have really good pizza too. How many people got psyched up for a free lunch only to find out they have to wait in line for hours.

What would have been a better user experience? You could have mailed coupons to everyone in the area for the same deal. That would have spread out the demand over the life of the coupon instead of it all happening on one day.

While working with Smucker’s I would always marvel at how closely they guarded their brand’s image. Everything from the way the packaging looked to how it was presented on the store shelves was thought through to the most minute detail. They even put a scent in the jelly jars so that when you first open a jar you get a burst of fresh fruit smell. Now that’s a brand experience.

Maybe when the dust settles Papa Johns might be ahead of the game. Creating a one day event might turn out to be better publicity than a coupon would be. But they have to be careful not to alienate more people than they already have and long term hurt their brand even more.

I register for way too many websites. I probably average about two a week. Usually I register to leave a comment or just to see what they are all about. I get a kick out of checking out other people’s interfaces and sign up processes.

There is a standard sign up process out there that most sites follow and it’s not really a good one. You get to a page that collects a bunch of personal information and then asks you to enter a code, usually a string of nonsensical characters to ward off spam bots. Then they dispatch an email to you so you can click on a link to confirm that you are a human.

This may prevent sites from receiving spam, but it also puts up a major roadblock for users. I signup for a site without thinking twice because that’s what I do. I also know that I am not the average user. The average user hits the back button or goes to another site. This has been the challenge of starting any kind of site for years and a lot of smart people have been doing a lot of interesting things to improve the sign up process. One of which, open ID, aims to become a universal login name that can be used on multiple sites.

A recent A List Apart article by Luke Wroblewski talked about best practices of sign up forms. More specifically he talked about why sign up forms must die. A lot of sites require a user to sign up to participate when they really don’t have to. That is the fastest way to set your site up for failure.

The site that got me thinking about all this is called Kaboodle. There was a box to leave a comment and so I did. When clicked submit it made me sign up to leave a comment, something a vast majority of blogs out there don’t require you to do.

I have to admit this was a little obnoxious, but this obnoxiousness was done very well. It didn’t take me to a separate page, just a pop up that asked me a few questions. After clicking sign up it left my comment and I was a member. Only after becoming a member did I look to see what the site was about.