In my first year as a web developer, I remember the VP of content at my company telling me, “You guys are kind of like auto mechanics: you just tell us what work is needed and how long it will take, and since we don’t really have any idea if you’re full of it or not, we just agree to it.” Yeah, that’s pretty much true, but she made it sound so sinister!
I certainly see how things can be confusing. I envision a request to change some text in an HTML page, versus having to change database driven content with some strict database access regulations. As far as the requester is concerned, it’s text on a web page. Why does one have to be sent to a DBA, and the other doesn’t?
Of course, then there are those who assume because the presentation of content is similar, that you are full of it when estimating these things. That can be frustrating, and it usually gets more frustrating when you try to explain it to them. It seems like (in my experience, at least) these are also the type of people who’s eyes tend to glaze over at the first utterance of ‘HTML’, effectively tuning you out completely.
Anyway, as an homage to our wonderful clients, I thought I’d share this classic (circa 2000) tidbit I ran across on del.icio.us this afternoon. I haven’t read all of these, but my favorite so far is this one:
A recent client my company got.
Client: “We want a website that can play DVD quality video, but we don’t want to use streaming video and the load time must be zero.”
Designer: “That’s impossible. Everything has a load time. DVD quality runs about 100 megs a minute.”
Client: “We’ll take our business elsewhere…”
Enjoy.
