General questions on working with clients
- From: "rhino" <No.offline.contact.please@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:13:36 -0400
I am currently developing a website for a client, a medical practitioner. A
few general issues have come up and I thought I'd ask here to see if I could
get some advice.
First, what is the best way to get him involved? We had a short initial
meeting where we agreed on the basic type of content he wants. I've got a
skeleton together which shows the basic layout and navigation. He likes this
just fine. However, as I've gone ahead and tried various things, like
different sorts of tabs and colour schemes, I am unable to get much in the
way of feedback from him. I've sent him emails that outline what I've done
in the latest batch of changes and ask for his reaction: does he like X?
Would he prefer Y or Z? If he answers at all, the reply is very brief and
vague.
I don't want to take a lot of his time so I limit myself to one or two
contacts a month for fear of being thought a nag but the lack of useful
feedback is really hurting my ability to build what he wants. Every time I
get a bit of momentum going and want to see if he likes what I'm doing, I
get little if any feedback and even that takes weeks. I am totally open to
anything he wants to do and am reluctant to just build something without
consulting him for fear that it will be completely unlike whatever he had in
mind. I've done enough systems development work to know that systems people
typically build far more complex and powerful things than customers actually
want.
Can anyone advise me on how to get him to give me some direction? I don't
need him to pre-approve every small change but we need some kind of process
where he answers my questions occasionally.
To give one example of how things stand, I sent him an email several weeks
back where I told him about a rough first draft of a banner I had put on the
home page, mentioned that I had three different kinds of navigation tabs on
the index for him to examine, and needed some information on what kind of
information he wanted in the newsletter, such as who the audience was and
who was to compose it (me, him, or his office staff). All I got was a
comment that the basic colours weren't quite right yet, suggesting that
white and green might look nice. He didn't tell me which of those he wanted
as a background and which as the foreground and whether he wanted a dark
green or a light green.
As you can see, I'm not getting much to work with and I'd like to know how
to get more from him. I certainly don't want to take a lot of time from his
busy schedule; I feel sure that if I start nagging at him, he will give me
LESS feedback, not more. Any constructive suggestions you have would be
welcome!
Also, while I'm here, let me ask a related technical question. My client is
not terribly happy with the basic colour scheme yet so I'm wondering what
techniques other web designers use with their clients to choose colours? I'm
thinking of cobbling together some kind fo Javascript thing to let him
choose from several different colour combinations via a dropdown; each
selection will cause a different CSS to be invoked and show him a different
possibility. Has anyone else tried anything like this? Or is there a better
way?
--
Rhino
.
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