I can only assume you educated the client as to the standards you were going to use and the subsequent impact on sub-standards browsers. They understood and agreed to that. Then they changed their mind and decided that they needed a hybrid design that would render fully in older browsers. Lacking the budget to ask you make the necessary changes, they took it upon themselves (or their 13 year old nephew) to make the changes. The nephew couldn’t find the layout images that were written as CSS background images, so he took a screen shot and compressed it — hence the terrible artifacting on the main page image. He couldn’t make head nor tail of the CSS styled list navigation as that wasn’t in his “HTML in 24 Hours” book — so he went with images.

All of these atrocities commited because the MD still uses Netscape 4.7.

Clients are stupid, it’s our job to help them with that, but it’s not always possible.

And why did they feel the need to touch the site if the content is managed by MovableType? They wouldn’t need to touch the code at all to make changes.

Part of it is the fact that your client usually doesn’t know any better. They pay you X amount of dollars to develop a site and then someone says “hey, you paid that guy that much money for this site, well my kid knows a little HTML from a class he took at the YMCA why don’t you let him do it for you cheaper”. Particularly right now with everyone cutting back, most people don’t know good design from bad design, or the underlying complexity of developing a web site, concepts like usability, HCI, CSS, web standards, don’t mean anything to them.

I spent countless hours and the smallest web design fee I have ever worked for working on a project. Now, every few days since it shipped, I have gotten a little email back telling me to tweak it in some way. First it was simple, add a little somthing here, take this out. But now, they want me to take off a part of the header, and turn it into a gigantic background immage. She wants me to take a Monet art peice, and have it (very darkened mind you) the background of the white text. I kept telling her that you can’t read text, and that the way I had it before gave balance to the page.

Where does one draw the line for how much they modify their work?

what is also disturbing is that the jpeg compression they used made the images look horrible, check “Scroll to Menu” .

good that we have personal pages i guess :)

Oh, and Adam (comment 18), that’s funny. For only $250 bucks they’ll even design a site for you! (I guess they’re now web designers?)

Sigh.

What I got in return from the PRINT ONLY internal art department was straight out of the early 90s. My well styled header with beautiful photography was replaced with some badly rendered “swirl” vector art, my tab buttons that they had requested were replaced by EXACT copies of apple.com’s tabs and even rendered so small that you could never see them on a normal screen and the document was of course 200 dpi. AND they had already gotten it approved by management (SOMEHOW) over my originals. (Remember this is still using my basic concept layout)

When we got it back, we basically said sorry but we can’t use this, and offered an alternative concept to which they said, “We’re not going to present this because we already have the other one approved.” So now instead of firing the client like we should have I am forced to implement this horrid design. I wish it was live so I could show it, but alas it is not yet finished. I won’t even get into how badly they have already bastardized my templates and CSS.

How do other designers deal with this? Do they use a local copy for their portfolio? Do they explain what happened? Most starting designers can’t afford to omit a major project form their portfolio.