Quote from: sottwell at Feb 21, 2006, 05:05 AMI’d just be happy to have a client period. My partner is not having much luck getting any, either they don’t want to pay or they have really unreasonable expectations.
Yeah, though I am new to this business (it’s my first website), I know the feeling... it’s amazing how unaware most people can be about the work and skills needed to build a decent website. Most of the time clients don’t "see" the difference between compliant & well thought out design and ugly coded yet graphically decent ones.
In France, we’re far behind what is done in the US or UK. 90% of web agencies build table based layout, and some don’t even add a DTD to their pages (I would say around 20%...). Plus there are a LOT of Flash sites... it’s still considered by clients top notch to do Flash websites... So it’s "easier" for me here (which does not mean it’s easy), since the competition is less fierce (though more an more webdesigners learn to do XHTML/CSS design, let’s be fair). Plus, most CMS used by web agencies in France (when they use a CMS at all...) are not great at templating or real customisation : SPIP, Typo3 and Mambo have a 95% share of the market. I have started to make a "reputation" back in 2004 when I translated Textpattern and did some promoting of more "modern", standard compliant CMS (a benefit of speaking english, might I add...).
Lately, my activities with MODx have raised growing interrest : last friday I even had a prospect coming to me because he is not satisfied with other CMS’s capabilities and ask for a proposal based on MODx. It’s a bigger project with a 20 pages detail specifications provided (this one could be a nice french showcase for MODx. If I get the contract, I might even need some of you guys services
). This being said, even with this, there is still a lot to be done to make the business profitable in the long run...
In a way, you have to educate your clients. But even when you explain the benefits in terms of accessiblity, maintenance and long term cost of standard compliancy, flexible user-oriented tools, it’s still no that easy to get a decent price out of this business.
Also, I have found that defining a clear process, with documents each step of the way to formalize what is agreed upon is a great helper. I build a process based on
Web Redesign 2.0’s book which has improved things for me (the first website was a subcontract, not well defined...).
Quote from: garryn at Feb 21, 2006, 05:53 AMWell done on the site! 
Nice combination of colours.
Thanks ! I must say having your opinion is a great motivator, since the client himself is rather ungrateful about the work done...
Quote from: garryn I would agree with Susan about the search box, I think having a permanent place near to the navigation would be ideal.
Thanks for the input, as I said, I’ll consider this modification if the client finally pays...
Quote from: garrynI had a really bad run with clients like this, it turned me off designing websites for a couple of years. Only just getting back into website designing - should have my first website ready to showcase in a couple of weeks though.
I can understand this... luckily so far it’s one out of three, and it was a subcontract (I’ll be very carefull about this in the future).
Thanks guys for the feedback and testimonies about the job... greatly helping !
). It will feature about 100 articles when data is inserted. Other than that, some pages are both in german and french. Given the number of pages, I did the multilingual setup the "oldfashioned" way, by putting german pages in a folder and setting links both ways manually.
) criticism, so here it is :
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