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Top 10 tricks to piss off your webmaster.

h3  ~  6 Dec 2007, 07:15  –  17 comments

I've been a web designer for quite a long time now, so I can assure you that these are the best tricks to piss off your webmaster, and possibly end up with a voodoo doll of yourself on a geek's desk.

Any similarity with real people/events is purely coincidental and no-one should feel targeted, I've made this list solely for fun.

So here it is (in no particular order):

  1. Pre-reserve your domain and hosting with a small and obscure foreign web based company.

  2. Assume that those who made your website also inherited the technical support for your emails.

  3. Send all your texts on plain old paper, but not handwritten. It's important that the guy who has to retype them knows that there is a digital version somewhere.

  4. When the webmaster ask for your logo, give him an old business card that was in your wallet for the last 3 years.

  5. When he ask "what you would like to be able to change by yourself in your website", answer "everything!". And when the site is done, send him your stuff instead of changing it yourself.

  6. Ask him a for "plug & play" quotation, Ex.: "I'd like a quotation of the site with and without a shopping cart, with and without the gallery .." and so on for every single part of your site.

  7. Send him drafts, let him integrate them, then send some corrections.. iterate over and over until he collapse crying in a corner of the room.

  8. Although you don't know anything about the web (and proclaim it), insist that the web designers do the site exactly like you want it instead of what they think would be best for you.

  9. During the initial meeting, brag that you will write all the needed texts over night and send them back the next morning. Then give no sign of life for the next 3 month and call back asking "Is my site done yet ?!"

  10. Tell him you need a Youtube like website but with Facebook functionalities and the simplicity of Google. Of course you have a very limited budget and the quotation must be on your desk for the next morning.

Bonus: When you receive your quotation argue that your nephew can do it for a fraction of the price in his basement.

UPDATE: I posted a follow-up blog post...

post a comment Comments

awesome, i live this list on a daily basis...

Anonymous ~ January 7, 2008 at 3:17 a.m.

Wow, speaking of going off and crying... :) I went through hell and back twice for clients because of #1.

Dr. Pete ~ January 7, 2008 at 9:43 a.m.

Okay, some of these (4,7,8,9) have made me cry before. It's good to be laughing now.

me ~ January 7, 2008 at 4:13 p.m.

Nice. MAKE MY LOGO BIGGER and use more red and yellow in the design. I have a brick tile I want to use as the background. Is that cool?

Matt C ~ January 7, 2008 at 7:46 p.m.

That is EXACTLY right!

Anonymous ~ January 8, 2008 at 3:02 p.m.

Give me a break guys. Which one of you are real and which ones of you are scams?

Below are what are normally heard when talking to an SEOer

  1. We charge 65 dollars per hour with an 8-hour minimum.
  2. We only give advise,
  3. We tell you what to change, you make the changes to your web site
  4. If you want us to do something to your site that will cost extra above the 65-dollar hourly rate.
  5. We do all the research by hand, which makes us better because software can’t match what a human can do by hand. When really SEO’s use software anyone over 5 years could use.
  6. We can get your key words to the top of the list in a few days time (small print: long as we pick them for you)
  7. The key words you want to use are not as good as google say they are, you should use these now and later use the harder words. (Bull S… )
  8. I am the SEO and I know what is best for your business even if I know nothing about your products.
  9. For only 40 dollars a month we will summit your web site to 350 search engines.
  10. For a small yearly fee of 399 dollars we give you a link 5 levels down on our link farm.
  11. For 500 dollars a month we will boost your traffic by placing your banner ad on our web site. We have artists waiting to create your banner ad for you for only 65 dollars per hour with an 8-hour minimum.

I forgot the one that my friend fell for where the SEO charged him 599 dollars to set him up with a web domain. That word Web Domain made my friend think he was getting a whole web site which he did. He was setup with a yahoo starter account which yahoo sells for 8.95 a month complete, you just have to add content and images. So he was taken for a lot of money and still had nothing.

Anonymous ~ January 9, 2008 at 10:33 a.m.

Don't forget to choose 7 different fonts to make that design more "dynamic"

Anonymous ~ January 9, 2008 at 6:58 p.m.

To the Anonymous dude who wants a break.

Did you even read the article ? I make website .. no SEO. Seriously, where did you read SEO ? It's not even a service that we offer where I work, and we never did ;)

And it's not because your friend got screwed that everybody will screw their customers. Anyway, your point makes no sense and is totally out of context.

You also missed the part where I said that I've done this list solely for fun I think.

Have a nice break.

h3 ~ January 9, 2008 at 7:46 p.m.

I have a current customer that started off with #7 for 1 month, then rapidly switched to combination of #8 and #3 for the next month and then in early January, appears that he switched tactics to #9. That and he wants a landing page with a really obscure script font that only comes with some models of the iMac. Gee, no, I don't have any qualms about embedding text in a transparent image so that the 99% of people that don't have that font installed can see it the way you want it.

Shoal Creek ~ February 24, 2008 at 11:04 a.m.

In my time as IT manager for a web dev company, I've seen all of these many times. But #3 was our worst; the number of clients who insisted on faxing printed Word documents to us was unbelievable! We finally avenged ourselves by advising all clients that our fee for retyping faxed documents is $275.00 per hour, in whole hourly increments. Or they can email/snail us the Word document and have the content included in the original quoted price. It worked!

Mystikan ~ March 4, 2008 at 11:22 a.m.

Stumbled! Upon this list of "top 10 tricks to piss off your webmaster" from our Web Hosting Company Blog and have succeeded in avoiding this by preparing professional contracts and outlining provisions with a down deposit prior to any undertaking of web development projects.

hostdemon.net ~ March 6, 2008 at 6:51 p.m.

This is like group therapy :)

Number 8 is hands down the most common phenomenon I encounter as a designer. Why it is that business owners--with nothing to lose and everything to gain--think that their ideas are somehow going to trump those of a designer (who lives and breathes this stuff) is utterly beyond me.

Couple that with budget planning like #10, and that's 25% of my client base. People. Get REAL. You can't start a business on a SAVINGS ACCOUNT.

chuckling... ~ March 7, 2008 at 6:30 a.m.

Every point is painfuly spot on! Well done

Andy D ~ March 23, 2008 at 5:42 a.m.

Jesus, I've just red twelve years of my life resumed in ten sentences. I hate you, whoever you are.

Emile Secret ~ March 26, 2008 at 7:46 p.m.

Wooo, from any corner of the globe the same problems!! amazing! it seems that you're a clone of mine :D:D

2dispari ~ March 28, 2008 at 11:15 p.m.

i can relate to all of them :-P

Anonymous ~ April 12, 2008 at 8:12 p.m.

Every single word is perfectly true. Best thing we had yet: "Make that line half a pixel thicker..."

Anonymous ~ April 15, 2008 at 9:47 a.m.
Copyrighted stuff .. u know.