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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Copy & Paste Mentality

We all know that a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment is prone to illicit repro­duc­tions: songs, movies, stylesheets, markup, code, graph­ics, soft­ware etc. You name it. All your bits are belong to us! As such this is noth­ing new, I remem­ber the days when tapes were hot, hot, hot! But some­how there was at least some level of effort put into get­ting that wicked new album on tape – after which you shared it with your friends get­ting drunk while play­ing NHL or Road Rash on a Sega Gen­e­sis (yup, those were the days).

Presently shar­ing requires as much effort as switch­ing on your com­puter. Aside from the fact that shar­ing is inher­ent to a net­work, a wor­ri­some trend is tak­ing shape: copy and paste men­tal­ity is infect­ing all lay­ers of soci­ety, not only the com­puter lit­er­ate and hard­core geeks. In the great tra­di­tion of client sto­ries from hell, here’s my version.

While work­ing on a cor­po­rate web site I get a phone call from the client: “Umm, yes, we just had a meet­ing with our 3 CEO’s and would like to expand the site with a few extra sec­tions, is that pos­si­ble?” Ok, first of, what the f***? 3 CEO’s? Ugh, wel­come to feed­back and approval cycle from hell. Any­way, more busi­ness is always good, so I told them I’d send a revised offer and con­tract. No big­gie. Right?

Two days later I get another phone call: “Yeah, errmÂ… we had a look at your offer but found its price rather dis­turb­ing.” I get these types of answers most of the time, clients always think any price is ridicu­lous, what­ever the amount (tip: odds are a client will try to bar­gain, make sure you cal­cu­late some safety mar­gin; any­where between 15% and 20% will do). After get­ting the “this price is ridicu­lous” preach, I explain how I cal­cu­late my fees, the amount of work it will take and of course offer them a 15% rebate since they’re request­ing more busi­ness (safety mar­gin, remem­ber). But at that exact moment light­en­ing strikes: “Yes, yes, yes, that’s all fine, but isn’t a few extra pages just a mat­ter of copy and paste.”

Click, click, boom! Copy and paste mentalityÂ…

It’s dur­ing moments such as these that I hate clients more than I need them. As if mat­ters couldn’t get any worse, my sen­si­ble explaina­tions failed mis­er­ably to con­vince the client oth­er­wise: “Yeah, well, if you’re going to charge for these few extra sec­tions we’re afraid that we’ll be forced to take our busi­ness else­where.” Talk about extreme mea­sures. Worst of all, I already fin­ished all the com­po­si­tions and just got approval, from all 3 CEO’s, which is close to a miracle.

So I ask you? What would you have done? Give in, and fin­ish the project with­out billing for the other sec­tions and keep a client happy (and get the full ini­tial amount)? Or, refuse to do work for free and tell them to f*** them­selves, accom­pa­nied by the tra­di­tional mid­dle fin­ger. Yet bill for the hours already worked and risk los­ing a refer­ral and money?

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

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15 comments on “Copy & Paste Mentality”

  1. Posted by ak on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

    it all depends on if you want to see them man­gle the design with copy­ing and past­ing when they have no idea what the dif­fer­ence between one tag and another are.

    if you’ve already done the work, why not? make them happy..

  2. Posted by Ryan Brill on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

    It’s a tough call, no doubt. I’d say it would party depend on how badly I need the work. If I didn’t really need the work (or rather, the money ;) I would be less likely to play their lit­tle game and deal with them. How­ever, since I always seem to need the work, I find myself giv­ing more than I should be expected to and won­der­ing why…

    What I don’t get is *why* they think they should get all this extra work for free, or *why* the prices should be so cheap. We are pro­fes­sion­als, doing pro­fes­sional grade work. In the web devel­op­ment indus­try, tech­nol­ogy is con­stantly chang­ing and being updated, forc­ing us to con­stantly be learn­ing and try­ing to stay ahead of the curve. I real­ize that a lot of 14 year olds can make web pages, how­ever, they sel­dom have the expe­ri­ence or skill of some­one who does this to put food on the table. Sure, their prices are prob­a­bly less than yours or mine, but is it worth it? The dif­fer­ence in the qual­ity of the work is rarely a match.

    I guess it all boils down to scope creep. Per­son­ally, I’d allow a lit­tle bit (you’re prob­a­bly always going to have some) but be care­ful how much you do on your own dime. Clients can’t hon­estly expect to add a bunch of work and not be charged for it, even though they often try.

  3. Posted by Jeff Minard on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    I would tell them this.

    “If you wish to seek cheaper busi­ness part­ners for pro­duc­ing your web­site, I would not dis­cour­age you in your endeav­our. How­ever, you must remem­ber that any­one worth their met­tle will prob­a­bly charge just as much as myself and any­one who charges less and agrees that this project is simm­ply “copy­ing and past­ing” will most likely *not* do a good job.”

    You may also wish to men­tion that since you built the site there is no chance you’ll break it. If some­one else does it, your likely to end up with what you talked about in your other story — a mess of bad, redone htm-something.

    Then of course they have to pay you to fix it. ;D

  4. Posted by Andy Budd on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    It’s a bug­ger isn’t it. Unfor­tu­nately most clients don’t get what’s involved in build­ing a site. This isn’t really their fault, as why should they?

    Unfor­tu­nately, because the cost of entry in becom­ing a web design­ers is very low, this pro­fes­sion has been tarred some­what by cheap and cheer­ful ‘$100 for 5 pages’ bed­room web design­ers. If your 15 year old nephew can knock up a web­site in DW for the cost of a set of Poke­mon trad­ing cards, how on earth can we expect clients to under­stand what’s involved in a pro­fes­sional project.

    Unfor­tu­nately many clients see web design as a low cost medium and this doesn’t look like it’s chang­ing in a hurry. It’s a buy­ers mar­ket out there. The right thing to do is stand your ground, explain your rea­son­ing, and hope that your clients see sense. How­ever, if you do this, some­body out there is always going to be will­ing to under­cut you. If you give in, you get stuck in a cycle of charg­ing much less for work that you actu­ally should be, and help­ing to devalue the indus­try even further.

    I wish there was some rock solid answer, but at the end of the day it’s really a judge­ment call. If you’ve got plenty of work, then stand your ground. If you’ve lost the last 3 clients because of pric­ing you either need to get bet­ter clients (which is tough) or cut cor­ners and man­age the project as tightly as you pos­si­bly can, to get back what you’re losing.

    A while ago, some­body from a big web com­pany said to me that they never end up charg­ing out all the time they spend on a project. They prob­a­bly spend at least 20% extra on top of their charge­able time, prob­a­bly more. The thing to do is to keep good time logs and track your prof­itabil­ity over each project so at least you can make sure you’re mak­ing money and not doing work for charity.

  5. Posted by Daniel on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    This fun­da­men­tal phi­los­o­phy, that every­thing online should be cheaper and faster, extends beyond web design. I work in the adver­tis­ing research indus­try, and we often com­pare the cost of con­duct­ing research online to the cost offline (phone). Usu­ally, online research is less expen­sive, but not nec­es­sar­ily because it’s online; rather, it’s less expen­sive because our method­ol­ogy doesn’t trans­late com­pletely to an online medium, so we gather less rich data. In those projects in which we mimic our method­ol­ogy as closely as pos­si­ble online, the price normalizes.

    Clients (and client ser­vice) are befud­dled by this. Appar­ently, the amal­gam of magic from all the MMP RPGs is sup­posed to seep into online inter­view research, at once expos­ing the true, inti­mate, hid­den core of respon­dents to clients and agen­cies, while doing so for pen­nies on the dollar.

    Folks, work is work. Copy isn’t cheap, online or off. Get­ting peo­ple to com­plete your sur­vey isn’t cheap, online or off. Design work isn’t cheap, online or off. You get what you pay for, so you should pay for what you expect to get.

  6. Posted by Nollind Whachell on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    First off, I gotta say, I love these last two posts of yours. I just stum­bled across your site and when I read your last two posts, I went “bingo!”. Why? I’m start­ing to do some research on “client behav­iour”, if you want to call it that, and this is exactly the type of stuff I’m look­ing for.

    As for your answer, I would say is this job going to lead to more work with them? If so, then if you give in, they will step all over you in the future. Guar­an­teed. I’ve expe­ri­enced it myself work­ing for a web firm in the past. There­fore, if you don’t like being stepped all over, I would stand behind your beliefs.

    The thing is though, while these clients may be ass­holes for expect­ing more work for noth­ing, this type of thing is com­mon­place in web design so you have to be pre­pared for it. More often than not, every­one hopes things will go smoothly and work out. Well, as we both know, Real­Life doesn’t work that way. Being pre­pared for the inevitable and edu­cat­ing peo­ple about it pre­pares you both for it. The first time this hap­pened to me at this web firm that I worked for, I asked those who were in con­tact with the clients some­thing to the effect of, “Did you tell them at the start that mod­i­fi­ca­tions out­side the approved scope is extra bill­able work?” “No” came the response. Well, if you don’t set guide­lines or bound­aries from the start, then the client can do what­ever the hell they want.

    More often than not, I find peo­ple get upset about some­thing when they are sur­prised about it (doesn’t mat­ter if they are being unre­al­is­tic or not). The thing to do is to tell the client this up front in a nice, polite, and, most impor­tant of all, eas­ily under­stand­able way. Make them see your logic up front. If they seem happy with your process, get them to approve it. No it doesn’t have to be a sign on the dot­ted line thing but just a quick email say­ing does my process sound accept­able to you. Once you get that reply say­ing “Yes”, you can refer back to it down the road. If they don’t agree with cer­tain aspects of it at the start though, then at least you won’t be wast­ing your time get­ting frus­trated later. You decide before the work starts how much lee­way they can have. Define it.

    An extra step I would have taken here for this inci­dent would have been to make them real­ize that it isn’t just a sim­ple cut-n-paste solu­tion. Cut­ting and past­ing takes like not even a few sec­onds to do, at worse an hour maybe. Adding site sec­tions adds on not sec­onds, but hours or even days to a project. Explain the details of what actu­ally goes into adding those extra sec­tions and even more so, explain the impact those extra sec­tions will have on the site (i.e. nav­i­ga­tional struc­ture, extended time­line, delayed launch, etc). Explain we are talk­ing hours/days, not sec­onds or min­utes (and then start cal­cut­ing the cost to you for this extra work, since some­one has to pay for it).

    As I said above, this will hap­pen again, there­fore be pre­pared for it. Mem­o­rize that response you know you will have to use again. Even bet­ter, inform them before you even begin. Tell them scope creep is nor­mal and this is how we deal with it. Show them your scope creep form and explain the impact to the time­line and cost of the project. Once they are informed, it is their option to choose that path or not. At least being informed ahead of time, they will know the con­se­quences of their actions (i.e. increased time­line and costs).

    Now if you did all of the above, let them know ahead of time about scope creep, showed them the form, explained the con­se­quences and they still turned around and screwed you, well then they are ass­holes. Do you want to work with ass­holes who will prob­a­bly screw you again in the future? I wouldn’t.

    BTW for a good book that talks about these real­i­ties, check out Web Redesign: Work­flow That Works. It’s prob­a­bly the only book that I’ve come across that con­tains most of my process beliefs.

  7. Posted by hemebond on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    Don’t give in. It affects not only you, but other design­ers and devel­op­ers as well.

    Maybe there should be unions or some­thing. No wait, I hate unions. You do need to stand together though. It’s the only way to get changes made.

  8. Posted by Nollind Whachell on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    You do need to stand together though. It’s the only way to get changes made.

    Well said. Actu­ally this is why I’ve been won­der­ing why a group of devel­op­ers haven’t got­ten together to edu­cate clients in a sim­ple eas­ily under­stand­able way (via a web­site). With it, every devel­oper who agrees with the same prin­ci­ples, could point to it and tell their clients “Why am I ask­ing you to trust me? This is why.”

    As many have said so far, clients seem to be out to touch with the real­i­ties of web design. I’m see­ing a lot of great work by web devel­op­ers com­mu­ni­cat­ing to other web devel­op­ers about web stan­dards and such. Change is occur­ring and it’s great to see but why hasn’t a group got­ten together to try to cre­ate a site focused towards clients to help them under­stand and real­ize the impor­tant aspect of web design as well (i.e. scope creep, etc)?

  9. Posted by Emily on Wednesday, February 25th, 2004.

    while you’re at edu­cat­ing clients, why don’t you edu­cate all the 14 year olds too? If these clients start get­ting all the standards/time/professional speak from peo­ple like me even (I actu­ally am 14 years old) they’ll be more likely to lis­ten. If you mean to change the whole tone of web­de­sign you will need to change the view points of all these kids and W3bD3s1gneRs (who you at least par­tially blame) as well as the clients, because we aren’t going to dis­ap­pear, and most of us won’t try to edu­cate our­selves like I do. Not that I’m prob­a­bly actu­ally one of the peo­ple you think of since I only have built sites for friends and myself (pro bono), but speak­ing for my age group.

  10. Posted by Brian on Wednesday, February 25th, 2004.

    Ask them, “When you bought your last car, did they give you an extra set of tires for free?”… the process to make them is the same over and over… they have so many, why not give away a few extra sets?

    or bet­ter yet, “Do you get free refills on your favorite wine as long as you sit at the table?”… it’s all from the same liq­uid… it’s already made up… it’s just a copy and paste, oh… excuse me an extra pour from the bottle.

    PS. thanks for the good read.

  11. Posted by Dustin on Wednesday, February 25th, 2004.

    Clients can be so hor­ri­ble some­times. I haven’t run into this prob­lem yet, but I’ve had my share of issues with clients. It’s amaz­ing how picky they think they can be for the small amount of money they are paying.

    Any­ways, I would have just done the work I think. I’m a pretty easy-going guy, so I’d do it if I were going to get some refer­rals later on from the company.

  12. Posted by brew on Thursday, February 26th, 2004.

    This is a dif­fi­cult one. If you choose to do the work for free, send them a break­down of the hours you spent on it and how much you would nor­mally charge out for those hours. Then ask them to pay what they think is fair. It would be inter­est­ing to see what they do. If you get some money out of it — bonus!

  13. Posted by robert on Friday, February 27th, 2004.

    Great com­ments all.

    It’s true you know… offline you can go to kinkos and print out the Annual Report the admin per­son put together in MSWord. Heck, they will even bind it for you and it will look decent.

    But it won’t be designed.

    So go to your local busi­ness card mom and pop print shop. They’ll offer you mul­ti­ple col­ors even and it’ll look decent. It may even have a small hint of design.

    The next step is the pro­fes­sional designer with a pro­fes­sional mar­ket­ing mes­sage all printed in four color process for your shareholders.

  14. Posted by Brandon on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2004.

    When you look at things from a client’s per­spec­tive, it does seem like you would only need to copy and paste. I just started design­ing sites a year-and-a-half ago, so I remem­ber how the inter­net seemed before I under­stood how it worked.

    Clients have prob­a­bly never seen HTML or CSS, and they assume that mak­ing a site is sim­ple drag-and-drop. They don’t real­ize how much work goes into the whole process. If clients actu­ally saw what it takes to build a good site…

    Also, since I’m 14 years old, I think I should address the issue of young, cheap design­ers steal­ing busi­ness. My rates are low ($10 — $15/hour), but I am only doing small stuff. If there’s some­thing I know I won’t be able to do well, I tell the client this and refer them to a more expe­ri­enced designer who can han­dle it.

  15. Posted by Nate Logan on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2004.

    I whole­heart­edly agree with Nollind.

    Due to all of the une­d­u­cated design, devel­op­ment, and pric­ing (AKA bag­gage) asso­ci­ated with the pro­fes­sional web design/development world, the only way to be on the same page with a client is to estab­lish expec­ta­tions before the work begins. Some­thing in writ­ing should clearly iden­tify the expec­ta­tions, deliv­er­ables, and com­pen­sa­tion for a given project. You can also spec­ify (or min­i­mally, dis­cuss) what addi­tional work (scope creep) will cost (in terms of time and money). The point is — make sure that expec­ta­tions on both sides are clear.

    Why? What are the ben­e­fits? Pri­mar­ily, there are no sur­prises for either party. They are not sur­prised in what they are get­ting; you are not sur­prised in what you are get­ting. It is my expe­ri­ence that such disputes/disagreements come from ini­tially wrong expec­ta­tions rather than from a client who is try­ing to weasel more work out of you than he orig­i­nally thought fair. Sec­on­dar­ily, if the rela­tion­ship goes sour, such a doc­u­ment puts the law on your side if the client tries to screw you 3/4 of the way through the project (at least in Idaho).

    In a sen­tence, *clearly set expec­ta­tions before the work begins*. Be some­what flex­i­ble (sell your­self, your ser­vice, and your rep­u­ta­tion), but never let your­self get screwed. By the way, beyond agreed upon deliv­er­ables, *you* deter­mine what it is to be screwed.